In the modern day, we’ve come to expect that our various applications can share our identity information with one another. Most of our core systems federate seamlessly and bi-directionally. This means that you can quite easily register and log in to a given service with the user account from another service or even invert that process (technically possible, not always advisable). But what is the next step in our evolution towards greater interoperability between our applications, services and systems?
Identity and access management: A long evolution
Identity and access management (IAM) has evolved into a sprawling field of separate but interrelated processes.
Even before the recent pandemic, both the users of our tech stacks and the servers that host their applications were becoming more and more dispersed and scattered. The pandemic only served to hyper-accelerate that trend.
As Gartner’s Cybersecurity Chief of Research, Mary Ruddy stated recently, “Digital security is reliant on identity whether we want it to be or not. In a world where users can be anywhere and applications are increasingly distributed across datacenters in the multi-cloud… identity and access is the control plane.”
Add to this the fact that most cybersecurity functions score about 2.5 on Gartner’s five-point maturity scale and we see the usual tech dynamic of convenience forging ahead as security struggles to keep pace.
To see how these patches of user databases and applications can be stitched together into a united whole and allow for risk and context-based access control across the board, we will explore ..
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