To maintain competitive advantage, digital transformation is no longer a choice – it’s an imperative. The rapid shift to the cloud and as-a-service models has enabled organizations to offer more digital services and applications across a wider range of devices for their workforce and customers. In this increasingly connected world, managing digital identities and access in a secure and adaptable way is critical and needs to play an important role in your business strategy.
Implementing identity services piecemeal every time you roll out a new digital service is expensive, slow, and risky. Within an organization, it can result in identity siloes that become difficult to manage and reconcile. To innovate successfully and improve time to market, industry analyst organization KuppingerCole recommends implementing an Identity Fabric. This is essential in helping you deliver seamless and secure access to the digital services your evolving business provides now and in the future to thousands and even millions of users – both customers and employees.
KuppingerCole points out that, ideally, the architecture of your Identity Fabric should incorporate an application programming interface (API)-based approach. This will ensure that identity services can be easily added to your digital services and applications in a standardized and consistent fashion. Additionally, your Identity Fabric should also enable integration with your legacy identity and access management (IAM) systems. An Identity Fabric will accelerate rollout of your innovative digital offerings while providing a positive user experience, a stronger security posture with privacy controls, and improved compliance.
Here are some of the things you want to look for when choosing your Identity Fabric:
- With dynamic orchestration and intelligence capabilities at the core, it should provide you with the flexibility and agility you need to build out new digital services or integrate with legacy systems.
- It should offer different deployment models with identical capabilities, whether on premises or as a service.
- Creating an exceptional user experience should be a core aspect of its functionality, along with security and privacy controls.
- In addition to the human angle, it should focus on the expanding population of connected things, from consumer devices like smartphones and GPS, to industrial Internet of Things (IoT).
And there’s much more. Join me and other industry leaders at the Virtual Event, Identity Fabrics and the Future of Identity Management, hosted by KuppingerCole. You’ll get specific guidance on the steps you need to take as you migrate from your legacy IAM system to a future-proof Identity Fabric. In my keynote address, I will discuss the concept of Identity Fabrics as platforms that provide all of the required services with a strong digital identity backend and the essential technologies required to build, deliver, and innovate at the speed of business.
