Authentication Control Practices Are Always Up to Date with Compass

Part of the Cobalt Iron Patents blog series

Here at Cobalt Iron, we never stop improving the business outcomes and the backup operational experience for our Compass® customers. You can tell by the many patents we’ve earned for the innovations going into the Compass® solution. Cobalt Iron innovations related to cyber security and automation are particularly game-changing. We are passionate about ensuring the Compass® solution continually provides:

• industry-leading cyber protection and resilience,
• as complete operational automation as possible,
• and tremendous business value.

Meeting these goals requires continual innovation.

In another blog, we talked about a patented technique called dynamic authorization control based on conditions and events. That’s another way of saying Compass® monitors for things like backup status and security alerts and optimizes access to IT resources accordingly.

This time we’ll tell you about a related Compass® capability — machine learning (ML) optimization of authentication control. It extends the dynamic authorization capability by applying new ML techniques — adding yet another layer of intelligence and security to enterprise IT resources and operations.

Why You Need It

Controlling authorization and access to IT resources such as data, data centers, hardware devices, and applications is a critical part of securing any enterprise business. Yet today’s authentication controls can’t keep up with continually changing business environments because they are static, seldom changed, and unresponsive to changing conditions and events. Often these controls are not monitored or analyzed to determine whether they are effective or optimized to achieve company security and safety objectives. And sometimes security administrators must change user authentication roles temporarily to ensure business security and safety under unusual circumstances, such as a fire or major weather event. The result is security holes that leave enterprise data, operations, and infrastructure vulnerable to attack.

What It Does

Thanks to patented, ML-driven techniques, Compass will:

• Collect training data including environmental event data, users’ permission access patterns, access control duration data, security events and alerts, project data, cyber-event information, security event logs, data protection operational results, and more.
• Analyze training data to determine the effectiveness of authentication controls during previous conditions and events.
• Generate ML rules to potentially adjust authentication controls during future conditions and events.
• Monitor for various conditions and events, including environmental events.
• Dynamically adjust user authentication privileges based on generated ML rules.
• Modify durations of user authentication privilege adjustments according to generated ML rules.

What it Means for You

With these Cobalt Iron innovations, authentication controls will continually improve over time by learning from the results of past controls. They may also get adjusted automatically based on the environment. This eliminates the pervasive security exposures of obsolete and unresponsive authorization controls and makes the entire IT infrastructure more secure and more intelligent.

You could use this technology in several ways. For example, you could automatically and temporarily restrict physical access to data center buildings or rooms during a fire or flood. Or you could temporarily increase access privileges for key IT personnel to data, data centers, or applications before a weather event to expedite emergency backup procedures.

This is just one of the many ways Compass® works like no other enterprise backup product out there. Watch this space to find out about others.

Meanwhile, contact us if you would like more information.