Just finished a "strategic briefing" with our CyberArk rep, where the main event was the grand unveiling of their new "Identity Security Risk Score." My immediate reaction, after wading through the slides full of impressive-looking dashboards and threat vectors? It's a beautifully packaged liability report, not an operational tool.
The core issue is the same old story: it aggregates a mountain of data (excessive privileges, stale accounts, compliance deviations) and spits out a single, ominous number. But what am I supposed to *do* with it? The score doesn't tell my team anything they don't already know from the existing, granular reports. In fact, it obscures the details. My analysts now have to:
* Drill down from the "score" to find the actual offending accounts or policies.
* Cross-reference with other systems to understand the *business context* of a risk.
* Justify remediation work based on a vague metric that management will inevitably start demanding we "lower," regardless of actual security impact.
This feels like a feature built for CISO dashboards to impress boards, not for the engineers who have to fix things. It's a vanity metric. I suspect the next sales push will be for their "Risk-Based Automation Modules" or some such add-on to actually act on the score they've just convinced you is critical.
Has anyone else been subjected to this rollout? I'm particularly curious if you've found a way to:
* Map this generic score to your specific, internal risk frameworks in a meaningful way.
* Avoid the inevitable "score chasing" that will detract from targeted, high-impact remediation work.
* Justify the likely premium or added resource consumption for a feature that seems to repackage existing data into a less actionable format.
— Oliver D.