The City of Las Vegas has deployed identity security technology from Palo Alto based Veza to secure access to sensitive data and critical infrastructure as it moves from a centralised legacy infrastructure to a hybrid multi-cloud environment. The new identity security technology will play a key role in securing Las Vegas smart city projects and support their development and implementation at greater speed and scale-out across the city.

As new access points emerge with City of Las Vegas’s migration to the cloud, Veza will secure each point according to the principle of Least Privilege across the enterprise.

To enhance public safety and provide better experiences for the 650,000 residents and 42 million annual visitors, Las Vegas has launched smart city projects to improve interoperability among all public service sectors through open-source data sharing and real-time data analytics.

Digital transformation and moving to a hybrid, multi-cloud environment improves city management and information sharing. However, it creates new security risks as data is shared and stored across multiple systems and applications. There is greater risk of exposure to malicious attacks such as ransomware and insider threats.

Through the implementation of Veza technology, the city has provided security, audit, and infrastructure teams with a unified platform to manage access permissions for employees, contractors, and interns. The new identity security is reducing security risk by assigning least-permissive roles for all identities (human and machine) across identity providers, cloud providers, and data systems, including Okta, Azure, AWS, and SharePoint.

The implementation allows Las Vegas to achieve continuous compliance with standards and regulations such as CISA and HIPAA with the authorisation context needed to build access controls.

“There was no easy way for us to manage thousands of access permissions across different systems for employees, contractors, and consultants. With Veza, we can validate that access policies are working as we intended,” said Michael Sherwood, Chief Innovation and Technology Officer, City of Las Vegas. “Veza gives us the confidence to know that we are improving our policies and right-sizing permissions so that we minimise the risk of a data breach.”

“We are thrilled to partner with the City of Las Vegas to help them visualise access, manage identity permissions to sensitive data, and strengthen access controls across their organisation,” said Tarun Thakur, Co-Founder and CEO at Veza. “Data is everywhere and without an automated process to find and fix identity risks, companies are left vulnerable to attacks. With Veza, the City of Las Vegas is protecting its customers and providing its security and identity professionals with unparalleled automation, access, and visibility to reduce security risks and strengthen its cyber defence against data breaches, privileged access abuse, and related attacks.”