As organizations diversify their IT environments to include cloud applications and software-as-a-service, protecting identity is now tantamount. Identity is the new perimeter — but for many organizations, securing identity is complicated by the fact that they don’t know what they have.

Hydden, a new identity management startup coming out of stealth with a $4.4 million seed funding round led by Access Venture Partners, bridges the identity gap by giving security teams visibility across the organization’s entire identity environment. Hydden’s platform connects to existing identity and access management tools, cloud applications, and on-premises applications to give organizations gain complete visibility into their identities, accounts, and privileges. The time capsule feature can be used in proactive threat management as it identifies patterns and aids in post-event analysis.

"We acknowledge the reality that CISOs are under unbelievable amounts of pressure. There’s not enough resources and not enough hours," says Jai Dargan, CEO and co-founder of Hydden. "We are going to take care of this one task."

Modern identity is more than just keeping track of passwords and implementing multi-factor authentication. Security teams have to manage accounts for cloud-based applications as well as for internal applications. There are non-human identities, such as service accounts, accounts used by automated processes, API keys, and application tokens.

Gaps in identity management also pose their own set of risks, such as over-provisioned or over-privileged accounts, misconfigured multi-factor authentication schemes, and unused accounts.  Credentials that were stored in places security teams didn’t even know about are being exposed.

Hydden addresses these gaps by creating a single data layer across identity access management, identity governance and administration, privileged access management, and identity threat detection and response products, the company said.

Several of the better-known established privilege access management and identity and access management tools on the market are focused on on-premise applications, which makes them less effective for organizations who are cloud-first, or have hybrid environments. The technology may be proven, notes Dargan, but they are not designed for cloud environments.

Hydden’s goal is to be the continuous source of truth, Dargan says. The platform is constantly looking at the IT environment to detect and classify identities, and issues warnings when identity-related risks are identified. Identity needs to evolve into real time, Dargan says, noting how the industry has evolved authentication into continuous authentication and network monitoring into continuous monitoring.

"We have network discovery and asset discovery," says Dargan. "Now we need continuous identity asset discovery."