Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) and Identity Access Management (IAM) systems are the cornerstone of today’s organization’s ecosystems. While this is true, many of these same organizations struggle to perform basic IAM functions consistently, and reliably. The problem in many cases comes down to legacy systems, rapid growth or rate of change that does not accommodate for proper deprecation leading to technical debt.
Businesses accumulate this technical debt at the expense of their speed, and scale, while perhaps indiscernible at first, it will eventually consume most of its IAM workforce, and of their dependent application, and development teams time simply to maintain or adhere to legacy flows, protocols, and processes.
Identity Fragmentation: A Complex Challenge
Identity Fragmentation undermines business objectives on multiple fronts. Some of it’s main effects often relate to:
Higher operational costs: managing multiple data sources, disparate processes, and in some cases data inconsistency consumes time and resources for maintenance, and compliance.
Increased security risks: fragmentation makes it harder to consistently enforce policies, this increased difficulty leads to gaps in security coverage. This is exacerbated if automation is limited leaving manual processes, and human coverage to properly security this complex system.
User experience: Users, including the admins and developers; of the systems and dependent applications will encounter inconsistent experiences, profile data, and difficulty in integrating with IAM systems. This increases frustration, service calls, and overall perception of a high-touch limited system.
Organizations struggling with these challenges often find themselves stuck in reactive mode, addressing immediate issues without a cohesive strategy for the future.
What Is an Identity Fabric?
While many might consider still through the lens of a directory system first, an identity fabric is a modern framework designed to unify the plethora of identity data sources and identity related services and processes across the enterprise. Key objectives being interoperability, data contextualization, scalability, and flexibility to address both cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments.
An identity fabric is then, rather than a replacement of existing systems, a unifying foundation where identities and their related data can be normalized, and passed seamlessly between applications, users, and devices. This aligns perfectly with modern IAM practices, and provides a robust path to zero-trust, federation, and user centric design.
Key Pillars of an Identity Fabric
Interoperability: an Identity Fabric seamlessly connects to data sources and applications
Data contextualization: Provides a centralized view of identity, and identity related data enabling connections and insights into risk, governance, and compliance
Scalability: Once set, an Identity Fabric grows with the organization without adding complexity or degrading performance
Flexibility: being able to cover different environments (cloud, on-prem, hybrid) while providing a consistent delivery and user experience across all end-points
Automation: Leveraging internal capabilities or through integrated systems, an identity fabric will automate processes, deliver workflows, and greatly reduce manual intervention all around.
The Business Case for an Identity Fabric
Building a business case for an Identity Fabric will consist of clearly articulating measurable benefits to the organization:
Risk Reduction: a centralized identity fabric will reduce risk by applying and enforcing policies consistently through better insights received from integrated risk signals
Improved User Experience: consistency across services will result in an increase of user satisfaction and a higher rate value add work in connected systems
Agility and Innovation: with data normalized and a unified identity ecosystem the introduction of new workflows, applications and services can increase new capability adoption with faster speed to market of new features, and integrations.
Lessons Learned from Past Implementations
Organizations that consider an Identity Fabric have a clear understanding of its benefits, and can articulate a roadmap that ensures leadership sponsorship. Implementing this model isn’t just about the technology, it will require a cross-functional collaborative approach, and a consistent focus on long-term goals.
Key lessons include:
Start with an environmental analysis: Identify early use cases that can represent opportunities for early wins
Identify your change champions: Bring your potential stakeholders influencers to your roadmap conversation, sell it early, focus on a collaborative approach.
Protocol Agnostic standards: Build a system on standards, and support widely accepted protocols, most importantly developer specific use cases to ensure easier adoption (e.g. REST, OAuth, OpenID, JSON)
Looking ahead:
IAM will continue to grow as an industry, as a result its data and integration requirements will grow alongside it. Organizations that require to look at IAM at scale will benefit from considering an Identity Fabric model with a clear roadmap. Looking ahead, critical integrations with AI, decentralized identities, and non-human identities will drive this model even further.
I hope you enjoy reading this article. Feel free to reach out if you want to chat further!
Picture credit: Identity Fabric diagram at Wiki Commons by Marius Godd
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