At IMPACT 24, CyberArk’s Identity Security Conference taking place this week in Nashville, Tennessee, CyberArk unveiled CORA AI, a new set of AI-powered capabilities embedded across every aspect of the CyberArk Identity Security Platform. The vendor also announced numerous enhancements to its Identity Security Platform and an agreement to acquire machine identity management Venafi from private equity firm Thoma Bravo.
In his opening keynote, CyberArk CEO Matt Cohen (pictured at top) stressed, “The world is changing, and we need to change our response or we risk getting left behind.”
CyberArk, which has its roots in privileged access management (PAM) and has evolved to an identity security platform, last week revealed research that shows that 93% of organizations had two or more identity-related breaches in the past year. In addition, cyber risk is rising along with the increase in machine identities, which the use of multi-cloud and AI are driving. CyberArk’s research finds that machine identities are the No. 1 cause of identity growth; survey respondents consider machine identities to be the riskiest identity type.
“Identities have exploded. It has become a force to be reckoned with that we have to confront,” Cohen told attendees.
Every identity—human and machine—needs the right level of privilege controls in order to be secure, Cohen said. “Paradigms of the past won’t solve the problems of the present and won’t prepare us for what is to come in the future.”
Bad actors are using AI to innovate and create new threats and identities, and AI needs to be a part of how we respond to those threats, he said.
CORA AI
The introduction of CORA AI was met with resounding applause by attendees. CyberArk’s new AI capabilities translate billions of identity-centric data points into actionable insights.
“Our approach around AI is one that comes from our core, which is obviously about security,” says Amy Blackshaw, vice president of product marketing, who spoke with MSP Success after the keynote. “And although CORA AI does provide ease of use capabilities and identity assistance and chat bots around our documentation, the most important part for us and our partners is to understand how CORA AI, being the brain of the identity security platform, really drives identity security insights that will help our customers find and respond to threats in a way that will make them more efficient and effective in their security posture.”
CORA AI offers a variety of features. “First and foremost, it’s truly an identity security assistant that MSPs will be able to talk to in their natural language and ask questions,” she explained. It can also provide security insights and identify anomalies in user sessions across the platform as well as offer or automate the remediation. “Previous to CORA AI, an [MSP] would have to review hours of session records to potentially find a needle in the haystack or find something that’s potentially noncompliant or risky that has occurred within that session,” she said. Other capabilities include policy automation, a documentation chat bot, and the detection and notification of security anomalies within AWS Secrets Manager using CyberArk Secrets Hub.
Venafi Acquisition
Bringing together the technologies of Venafi and CyberArk “will help organizations in the management and security of machine identities,” Blackshaw. “It needs to be done at scale. They have a great mature SaaS offering that is going to complement ours. And it’s time for organizations to really start thinking about how to get their arms around machine identities.”
Integration between the platforms won’t begin until the regulatory reviews are complete and the acquisition closes. Blackshaw expects that to happen some time during the second half of the year.
More Investment In MSPs
This spate of activity follows closely on the heels of the April launch of the CyberArk MSP Console, a new dashboard for MSPs to view and monitor their customers using the CyberArk Identity Security Platform.
“We are investing more in general in our partner program, but absolutely within the MSP space,” Blackshaw said. “Twenty-five years ago, the problem that we were solving was for the biggest and most complex organizations. That’s no longer the case. Every organization has identity security issues that need to be solved, but not all of those organizations are going to be able to leverage [our technology] themselves. And that’s where our partnership with MSPs is continuing to grow and strengthen.”
“CyberArk has been a solution that we bundle into our services for clients of all sizes and industries,” said Ben Radcliff, senior director of Optiv Managed at Optiv. “Everyone from the mom-and-pop small businesses that have to meet certain compliance standards to get cyber insurance to larger enterprises with teams dozens deep. A particularly hot industry right now for us reselling CyberArk is the financial industry. Regional banks are needing identity protection management and coming to us for solutions.”
While MSPs have been CyberArk partners prior to the new console, the MSP-tailored offering will allow them to use the platform more efficiently, she said. “It’s exciting news for us because I think it changes the opportunity for MSPs to better serve their customers by bringing them best-in-class identity security capabilities from CyberArk.”
“The CyberArk channel program has come a long way,” said Eric Tuttle, senior security architect at CTI Global. “They used to sell against MSPs and technology consultants, but now they really partner with us.”
Going Forward
Blackshaw said CyberArk has spent “a lot of time thinking through how to make our platform easier to use, more accessible, with a lower total footprint, lower total cost of ownership. Those show up in ways such as our secure browser. The CyberArk Secure Browser is something that MSPs could use for their customers that would be a far easier way for their end users to connect to really any type of session that they’re protecting on behalf of that customer.”
She also pointed to the updated session management capabilities announced at the conference as part of the platform enhancements. The idea was “making a lighter weight privileged session management capability, so much so that we’ve seen a 16 times reduction in the footprint of deploying that capability. From an MSP perspective, it’s a lot of cost savings, a lot of time saving and allocation of resources.”
Continued enhancement along those lines “are going to make it a lot easier for MSPs to see value and to drive value for their customers, which is what it’s all about.”
—Editor in Chief Allison Foelber contributed reporting and photography to this story.
