Why Real-Time Identity Event Monitoring Is Essential for Modern Security

Protecting digital identities is the foundation of corporate security. As attackers move faster, traditional identity governance alone is no longer enough. Businesses need real-time visibility into identity events to detect suspicious activity and respond before compromised access leads to a breach.

Cybersecurity teams are facing a perfect storm. Organizations continue to add cloud applications and external accounts to their environments, causing the attack surface to grow. At the same time, threats are becoming more sophisticated, from personalized phishing campaigns to AI-powered vulnerability exploitation.

In this complex threat landscape, identity is the first line of defense for protecting critical data. However, organizations can no longer rely solely on perimeter-security strategies and traditional playbooks. New approaches are needed to identify and respond to attacks as they happen.

Identity governance sets the rules—but monitoring shows when they are broken

Identity security has traditionally focused on governance, including role-based access, lifecycle automation, and regular access reviews. Governance helps organizations control who can access specific resources, ensuring user privileges remain appropriate and aligned with business objectives.

Identity governance remains a critical part of any security strategy. It reduces identity risk and improves IT productivity by streamlining user management. However, role-based provisioning and quarterly access reviews alone cannot protect organizations from today’s advanced attacks.

Defining access boundaries is important, but attackers do not follow organizational policies. Those policies cannot prevent a breach unless security teams know when they are being violated. Moving from passive identity-risk mitigation to proactive defense requires real-time monitoring and investigation of identity events as they occur.

Centralize identity event auditing and investigation

Finding active threats among countless recurring events can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. Relevance and context are essential when analyzing event data. Windows and Active Directory event logs generate large volumes of information that administrators can struggle to interpret without effective log aggregation, analysis, and filtering.

tenfold’s event auditing platform ingests event logs in real time, records the event types organizations want to monitor in its database, and adds important context. For example, tenfold automatically searches for session IDs to identify the user behind a change. Multi-step events, such as creating or renaming a security group, are consolidated into a single entry.

Powerful search tools help teams filter log data, while saved and shareable queries make recurring investigations easier. Create custom queries to review privileged-account logins, recently requested password resets, or other activity relevant to your environment. Centralized, unified logging helps security teams investigate suspicious identity activity more efficiently.

Keep your security stack lean with three solutions in one

Fragmented security tools can slow response times when every second matters. Signals may lack cross-platform context, while investigations can become trapped across multiple administrative portals. Consolidating the right capabilities can help security teams work more efficiently.

tenfold combines identity governance, data access governance, and real-time event monitoring in a single solution. Teams can audit identity events on the same platform used for onboarding workflows and access reviews, with the broader context of the governance toolset and identity directory.

If an account shows signs of compromise, you can create a report detailing everything that account can access. You can also update its lifecycle phase to temporarily lock down the account while the investigation continues.

Combine real-time identity visibility with detailed governance in one seamless, no-code package. Talk to our team to learn how tenfold can streamline governance and identity discovery in your environment.

Event auditing functionality is included in all 10x editions at no additional cost. Monitoring currently extends to Windows and Active Directory events. Support for Entra ID and automatic alerts will be added in a future release. Visit the feature page to learn more.

Sponsored and written by tenfold software.