Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) refers to a set of security practices and technologies designed to detect, investigate, and respond to threats targeting digital identities within an organization. These threats often involve compromised credentials, privilege escalation, or unauthorized access to sensitive systems. ITDR solutions work by continuously monitoring identity-related activities, analyzing behavior patterns, and identifying anomalies that may indicate malicious intent. Once a threat is detected, ITDR tools help security teams respond quickly by isolating affected accounts, enforcing multi-factor authentication, or initiating automated remediation workflows. As identity becomes a primary attack vector in modern cyber threats, ITDR plays a crucial role in strengthening an organization’s overall security posture.
Gartner defines user authentication as the journey-time process that provides credence in a claim to an identity established for a person for access to digital assets. User authentication is delivered by some combination of (a) an authenticator, (b) signals evaluation and (c) an authentication decision point, which may be from different vendors. User authentication is used to provide credence in an identity claim for a person already known to an organization. The credence must be sufficient to bring account takeover (ATO) risks within the organization’s risk tolerance. Without effective authentication, the security of and trust in that person’s digital interactions are deeply undermined. User authentication is foundational to and protects the value of other functions within an organization’s identity fabric, namely: runtime authorization, especially segregation of duties (SOD), audit (individual accountability), and identity analytics.
Workload Identity Management represents a critical segment within the broader Identity and Access Management (IAM) market. These solutions manage and secure the identities that organizations assign to workloads (non-human machine entities), such as applications (including AI agents), services, containers, VMs which require authenticated access to target systems. Workload Identity Management solutions deliver visibility into workloads, their identities, accounts and credentials, access policies, and their usage. They help enforce least privilege access and actively monitor for anomalous or risky activity. By continuously discovering workload identities, organizations can accurately inventory and maintain compliance with company policies and standards, as well as securely manage their associated credentials and access policies. These solutions enable organizations to discover, inventory, monitor, manage, and administer workload identities and any associated accounts, credentials, and access policies. The typical users of these solutions include IAM teams, cloud security teams, DevOps, and platform engineering teams responsible for managing non-human identities.