Jun 2, 2025
Jun 2, 2025
Organizations need a way to keep up with increasing SaaS risks, and ITDR emerged in response to that gap. However, as with any emerging category, not all solutions are equal.
ITDR, or Identity Threat Detection and Response, is one of the newer players in the security technology field, but it has already become a critical one. First introduced by Gartner in 2022, ITDR was coined to describe a growing set of tools and practices aimed at protecting identity systems, detecting compromises, and driving fast, effective remediation.
And the timing couldn’t have been better.
Attackers have adapted as identity has become the new security perimeter spanning cloud, SaaS, and hybrid work environments. Phishing, credential theft, and privilege abuse now dominate the threat landscape. Defenders needed a way to keep up, and ITDR emerged in response to that gap.
But as with any emerging category, not all solutions are created equal.
The standard ITDR solutions only provide surface-level alerts, flagging login anomalies or unusual locations. Others delve deeper, uncovering patterns of privilege escalation, lateral movement, and identity misuse across environments. The gap between them is not merely technical; it is a huge difference in the scope of identity-based attacks that companies can defend against. And choosing the wrong solution could result in completely missing a breach or becoming aware of emerging attacks.
In this article, we examine how identity threats unfold, where traditional tools fall short, and which capabilities define a truly effective ITDR security solution.
As detection and response strategies have matured for endpoints (EDR) and networks (NDR), identity has remained a blind spot, assumed to be protected by IAM hygiene and access policies. However, that assumption no longer holds.
Identity has become a primary target not only because of what it provides access to but also due to how deeply it’s integrated into organizational operations. Remote work, cloud-first infrastructure, and SaaS sprawl have transformed identity systems into both collaboration hubs and valuable attack surfaces.
Yet many organizations are still trying to monitor identity risk through the perspective of their IdP logs or outdated SIEM rules. This approach falls short for one simple reason: identity threats often resemble normal activity—until they don’t.
Advanced adversaries know how to:
These aren’t merely hygiene issues; they represent visibility and detection gaps.
That’s why identity-specific threat detection is critical. ITDR integrates signals, context, and logic to detect when identity is being used as the attack vector, not just the target. It distinguishes preventive measures (such as removing dormant accounts or tightening permissions) from real-time detection and response, which IAM tools and IGA systems weren’t designed to manage alone.
To keep pace with modern threats, detection must evolve from reactive alerts to TTP (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures)-driven analysis: identifying behavioral patterns, session anomalies, or privilege movements that indicate compromise across SaaS environments.
In summary, if identity is central to how your business operates, it must also be central to how you detect and respond to threats. This is the purpose for which ITDR was created—and the reason it’s rapidly becoming a foundational layer of modern security architecture.
The first wave of ITDR security solutions concentrated on the fundamentals: monitoring essential identity systems like Okta, Entra ID, and Ping for signs of compromise. They flagged suspicious logins, tracked brute-force attempts, alerted on privilege changes, and assisted security teams in identifying patterns that indicated account misuse.
It was a necessary step forward; however, the threat landscape didn’t stop there, nor did the risks.
Today, identity threats are no longer confined to your IdP. They extend across cloud platforms, third-party integrations, shadow SaaS tools, and enduring access that is rarely reviewed. Attackers do not need to bypass MFA or exploit a zero-day when they can simply reuse shared credentials, take advantage of over-permissioned roles, or quietly navigate through forgotten identities.
And most first-generation ITDR solutions weren’t built to prevent that.
They focused on identifying ongoing attacks rather than addressing the conditions that enable those attacks in the first place. They were unable to highlight identity hygiene issues, such as dormant accounts, misconfigured access policies, or risky OAuth grants, before attackers could exploit them.
They also tended to treat identity as an isolated system instead of a dynamic, interwoven component of your infrastructure. This led to limited context, siloed alerts, and blind spots in cloud and SaaS environments, where identity risk frequently resides.
Modern threats demand more than reactive detection. They require ITDR to understand how identity risk accumulates over time, moves laterally, and signals intent, even before the first alert is triggered.
If early ITDR acted like a smoke detector—alerting once something was already burning—ITDR 2.0 is more like fire prevention: reducing risk before ignition and knowing exactly where the fire could spread. This new wave of identity threat detection isn’t just more data; it’s more context. It’s the ability to connect weak signals, detect identity misuse in SaaS, and respond with precision before small gaps become major breaches.
Here’s what defines ITDR 2.0:
The best defense against identity threats isn’t detection—it’s prevention. ITDR 2.0 helps security teams identify and eliminate latent risks: over-permissioned accounts, shared credentials, dormant users, misconfigured admin roles, and vulnerable integrations. It’s not just about spotting an attack—it’s about reducing the space where attackers can operate.
Most identity monitoring stops at the IdP. ITDR 2.0 goes further by correlating activity across SaaS applications, OAuth grants, unmanaged accounts, non-human identities, and even browser extensions. It uncovers risks in areas where traditional tools do not look, helping SecOps teams stay ahead of the behaviors that attackers are now exploiting.
Static rules and login anomalies aren’t sufficient. ITDR 2.0 analyzes identity behavior in context, identifying multi-stage threats such as OAuth consent abuse, stealth privilege escalation, and suspicious app-to-app connections. Rather than overwhelming teams with one-off alerts, it constructs narratives to help responders understand what’s happening, why it matters, and where to take action.
When something goes wrong, time matters. ITDR 2.0 doesn’t just identify a compromised identity; it maps the blast radius. Who’s connected? What’s at risk? How far can the threat spread? With this visibility, teams can contain issues quickly and confidently before the damage spreads.
ITDR 2.0 doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It integrates into the broader security stack—SIEMs, SOARs, ticketing systems, and identity platforms—to accelerate responses and avoid duplicated efforts. More importantly, it aligns with how security teams actually operate, closing the loop between detection and remediation.
From the moment a user is onboarded until the day their access is revoked, ITDR 2.0 continuously monitors posture, activity, and anomalies. It learns, adapts, and evolves as your environment changes, ensuring that identity risk doesn’t accumulate silently over time.
In short, ITDR 2.0 shifts the focus from isolated identity signals to operationalized identity intelligence. It observes more, understands more, and empowers security teams to respond sooner—with greater accuracy and confidence.
Grip was the first to recognize that identity risk had exceeded its traditional boundaries—and that protecting identity required more than just a few anomaly detections linked to the IdP.
That’s why we built ITDR 2.0, the first identity threat detection and response platform designed specifically for today’s SaaS-driven environments. Grip connects the dots between identity posture, behavior, and threat signals across the entire SaaS ecosystem, not just the logins.
Our platform doesn’t just identify when something is wrong. It assists SecOps teams in understanding how it went wrong, what else is at risk, and how to fix it quickly, with real-time mapping, contextual insights, and automated remediation workflows.
As SaaS adoption continues to grow and identity becomes increasingly central to the way work is done, we believe ITDR security solutions must be proactive rather than reactive. They need to be continuous, contextual, and designed for the complexities of the modern identity environment.
That’s ITDR 2.0. And Grip is leading the way.
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