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October 04, 2023 · 4m read

Democratizing Security Signals

Matt Muller 

Material Team 

In security, we’re constantly trying to make sense of data – in real-time and with high stakes. That means turning data into strong, actionable signals that can be used across silos and platforms. And strong partnerships help make this a reality. In that spirit, we’re pleased to join several security industry leaders as a launch partner for Identity Threat Protection with Okta AI (Identity Threat Protection), further extending our technical integration with Okta by providing our unique Cloud Office security signals into Okta to empower security teams assessing the risk profile of users and sessions.

Find us at Oktane 2023 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco from Oct 3rd-5th at booth EM9 to meet the team and learn more!

Data Architecture Matters

Material was founded by three data analytics nerds (their words!), and the product architecture reflects that. Material syncs an organization’s entire email history and current activity into a data warehouse and uses it to power security controls, while giving security teams unprecedented insight into email data and risk

The promise of the data warehouse architecture is to bring together large, complex data sets like Material’s to create actionable insights, or for security teams, actionable signals. Material believes in this promise, but we recognize it brings a new set of challenges.

Much of the data pulled from different systems comes in different formats. Direct API integrations make connections seamless, but a user, session, and action can still look different from system to system. Without consistency across events and data, it’s difficult to give your security operations team actionable signals that will make a meaningful difference in an investigation.

Architecture matters. So does consistency.

Consistent Signals For Continuous Security

The Shared Signals and Events Framework (SSE) is an initiative within the OpenID Foundation that aims to standardize the sharing of events, signals, and other information between distributed security platforms, to more easily identify identity-based threats and prevent lateral movement in the case of an incident. SSE supports a streaming architecture that enables participating vendors to broadcast and receive events that indicate a risk-state change. 

We are excited to partner with Okta to share risk signals via this framework. Material’s unique visibility into Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace environments lets us provide security signals directly from inside the Cloud Office, such as tracking access to sensitive email and attachments, changes in collaboration behaviors, insight on email-based attacks like phishing, and tons of other interactions. By surfacing these over time into Identity Threat Protection alongside other great security partners in a standards-based way, customers can detect and respond to risk events, such as by changing their authorization or session policies, more quickly and with better visibility across the security estate. 

This new initiative builds on our strong partnership with Okta to bring greater access controls for mailboxes. We approach any new standard with a healthy balance of hope and humility. Given the strength of our teams and dedication to solving hard challenges for our customers, we expect great things to come. Stay tuned!

*Any products, features, or functionality referenced in this announcement that are not currently generally available, may not be delivered on time or at all. Product announcements do not represent a commitment, obligation, or promise to deliver any product, feature, or functionality, and customers should not rely on them to make purchase decisions.