Cybersecurity
Orchid Security publishes identity visibility guide
The article defined identity visibility, contrasted it with IAM policy and runtime behaviour, and sketched the capabilities and vendors it said organisations should consider for cloud and multicloud environments.
- The page said it was published by Orchid Security.
- It defined identity visibility as seeing every identity in an environment, the access it has and how that access is used at runtime.
- It said cloud and multicloud environments complicated identity visibility because permission models differed across providers and applications.
- It listed Orchid Security, Veza, SailPoint, Saviynt, Silverfort, Semperis and CrowdStrike Falcon Identity Protection as examples of identity visibility and intelligence platforms.
The article defined identity visibility as the ability to see every identity in an environment, the permissions attached to it and the way those permissions were used at runtime. It contrasted that with IAM systems, which describe intended access, rather than proving what actually happened.
It said the gap between policy and execution included local accounts, embedded service credentials, older authentication flows and connections that were never brought into a central identity provider. On that account, the hidden surface was a security issue rather than only an administration problem.
The article also said that many intrusions now began with stolen legitimate credentials, and that machine and other non-human identities had become common in cloud-heavy environments. It said cloud identity work became harder because AWS, Azure/Entra ID, Google Cloud and SaaS tools each expressed permissions differently.
It described identity visibility and intelligence platforms as tools for building a single inventory, mapping access relationships and analysing behaviour continuously. The page then listed several vendors, including Orchid Security, and said Orchid Security published the article while also appearing in the list.
Named in this story
Companies
- Orchid Security
- published the page and was one of the platforms listed
- Veza
- was listed as an observability-focused access graph platform
- SailPoint
- was listed as a governance-focused identity security platform
- Saviynt
- was listed as a governance and cloud entitlement management platform
- Silverfort
- was listed as a runtime authentication visibility and enforcement platform
- Semperis
- was listed as a platform for Active Directory and Entra ID protection
Products and systems
- CrowdStrike Falcon Identity Protection
- was listed as a detection-focused identity protection product
How the source tells it
The article read as a technical explainer with mild vendor positioning, because it paired general IAM guidance with a product list that included the publisher’s own company.
- vendor boosterism the vendor roundup presented product capabilities and included the publisher’s own platform among competitors