One request that comes up regularly with IAL3 is the ability to onboard the same day and deploy rapidly. Trust Swiftly is designed as a modern, cloud-deployable solution, so this is a normal request rather than an exception. Legacy providers have no quick onboarding path and no real capability for AI-native companies to plug into their tooling. Most alternative solutions carry at least a one-week onboarding process.
Speed to market and turnaround are the common problems companies hit when deploying IAL3. The verification requirements are well documented in NIST SP 800-63A-4. Getting an account, contracts, and a working workflow in place is where programs stall.
Built for Five Employees or Five Thousand
Trust Swiftly is optimized for all company sizes, from AI startups with five employees to Fortune 500 enterprises with thousands of in-scope employees. We understand the need for rapid compliance when a 3PAO assessment identifies a deficiency, or when a new material risk is identified internally.
We do not slow you down. We have seen the difference rapid response makes compared to waiting while an adversary prepares and executes their plan.
Onboarding in 15 Minutes, Not a Week
An MSA, DPA, and other agreements can be reviewed by your legal team before account setup, through a streamlined onboarding process. Typically, company due diligence requires multiple rounds of procurement, legal, and security analysis before a solution is selected. That process exists for good reasons, and we do not ask anyone to skip it.
What we do is remove the vendor as the bottleneck. When the need is urgent, our solution can be set up in as little as 15 minutes. That window covers account provisioning through the first verification, which is the number that actually matters: how long it takes to start an employee in the IAL3 process. For larger populations, that same speed carries into mass onboarding events and on-site proofing.
Insiders Do Not Turn Back
The most advanced companies are responding to threats in real time, and some are becoming predictive with their security responses.
In countless insider cases we have reviewed, the insider does not easily turn back into a trustworthy employee. Instead, they gradually become more brazen with their actions. In rare circumstances they may be managed, and the best outcome there is usually that they leave on their own accord after being caught through early remediation.
Having the employee complete a verification gives you another datapoint: it helps assess their fortitude in their cause and how far embedded they are into an organization. In one case, we flagged a prospective client months in advance to trigger IAL3 for their employees, at a point when one of their employees was still in the initial phases of becoming an active insider threat.
In the future, companies that use active monitoring to predict human behavior will be able to put mitigating factors in place before threat events occur. For example, every request in a web app can be analyzed, and the pattern or nature of those requests can result in a patch before the threat actor is able to successfully execute their code from their own penetration testing. Chain exploits are the new frontier, and we have seen insider threats operate as one part in complex chains of bad actors. We have already deployed this active threat management activity in several use cases and continue to see the value it will have going forward.
Dormant by Design
In one case, an insider was contacted by a known threat actor to commit unauthorized activity on behalf of another company. Most insiders are smart enough not to continuously break the law, and they work with only a few selective intermediaries to minimize the risk of exposure. They also selectively perform certain actions, such as deleting a specific file that would not trigger alarms, which lets them stay dormant for more critical future tasks.
This is one of the many reasons same-day IAL3 will be critical for companies in the future.
Insider threats are not something most organizations can prepare for or predict, but when they do happen you need to resolve the threat quickly through measures such as identity verification. An insider acting as good can flip to bad in seconds, which is why your countermeasures need to be in place beforehand, or stood up very quickly afterward, to limit damages.
There Is No List to Check
First, there is no public list of insiders. Any governmental ones are typically outdated, or they do not include the countless bad actors who are never exposed for various reasons. The FBI's wanted notices on fraudulent remote IT workers and the Justice Department's coordinated actions show what does get published, and it is a fraction of the activity.
Companies that do expose insiders through legal action are limited on options, which is another reason managing an actual insider becomes an extremely difficult task requiring immense resources to control. Insider threats are usually cultivated over years so they feel safe, and only then are they asked to commit more crimes in rapid succession.
Telemetry is sometimes useless as well. More advanced insider threats understand how to communicate and act offline, or use a proxy method that evades detection tools. In another case reviewed by Trust Swiftly, a threat actor was able to commit illegal activity while working at one of the top technology companies in the world for over three years, and was only discovered through a third-party observer who was focused on multiple insider threats. Google's own writeup on the insider threat posed by remote IT workers describes the same pattern from the defender's side.
In countless cases we have seen big and small companies alike try to handle insider threats with very little defense.
IAL3 Is the Simpler Option
IAL3 is the simpler option for many companies to achieve assurance on their employees, quickly and through unobtrusive methods. It will not tell you what an employee intends to do once they have access, but it resolves who they actually are, exposes proxies and impersonators before an authenticator is issued, and puts a committed insider's real biometrics on the record. It does not require a new detection stack or a multi-year program. If you are still evaluating approaches, our guide to choosing an IAL3 solution covers the tradeoffs, and our work on detecting insider threats and fake IT workers covers what identity proofing does and does not catch.
AI-First Companies and the Shrinking Insider Surface
AI-first companies, and eventually AI-led companies, will be able to maintain absolute security by setting up access control for each person accessing a system. This is the same principle behind zero trust architecture, applied to people rather than networks.
There may be a future where an AI runs a software product and a company end to end and only involves a human for specific steps. This definitely does not apply to all industries, but it does apply to ones that deal with advanced technology or proprietary information.
The fewer employees a company has, the less likely an insider threat can even exist. A company where no human is running it is better still, because there is no insider threat possibility at all. Instead, instant AI agents can be spawned and request a human only when needed for escalation cases. Ephemeral AI agents that execute specific tasks with limited knowledge and then shut down are key to keeping security threats contained.
Instead of large employee populations sharing foundational systems, these AI agents can decide who, when, and what level of assurance they need in order to interact with an employee. That is why having instant access to IAL3 verifications will be on the frontier of any system controlled by advanced AI. The system can operate autonomously, but there will need to be safeguards that allow a human back into the fold to take control when needed. The NIST AI Risk Management Framework points at the same requirement from the governance side.
Start Today
If a 3PAO finding, a new material risk, or a suspected insider is driving your timeline, the onboarding process should not be what holds you back. Review our IAL3 verification solution, see how we handle supervised remote proofing, or talk to us about a same-day IAL3 deployment.
