Commissioned by ForgeRock
1 Introduction
Digital Transformation affects all businesses, and Digital Transformation is changing IT in businesses fundamentally. Business workloads are shifting to the cloud and to as-a-service models. Businesses provide digital services to their customers and consumers via apps and integrate with devices and things. Business models are changing, customer relations are changing, and business partnerships are far more volatile than ever before.
Digital Identities are moving to the center of attention in this transformation. Without the ability to unify identities and control the access of everyone to every service, businesses will fail in their transformational initiatives. No business is unaffected by the Digital Transformation. Businesses and their leadership teams are challenged by the need for continuous innovation of both technology and business models as well as ubiquitous change in business partnerships and internal organizations.
There are many things business leaders need to do for their businesses, not only to survive, but to excel in Digital Transformation. One of the essential imperatives is putting Digital Identity at the center. In an age where direct services to consumers are the norm, where relationships to these consumers remain key to success but are under permanent threat, where business relationships change faster than ever before, and where all services become digital, identity is what links everyone and everything: employees, customers and consumers, business partners, but also their devices, things, and services. Identity is at the heart of true Digital Transformation.
Enabling access of employees to new cloud services and evolving the employee experience in using digital services is essential, as it is to enable seamless, yet secure access for potentially tens or hundreds of millions customers and consumers to new digital services. Digital leaders must balance their transformation efforts for enabling both the transition into a digital organization and the evolution towards digital business.
IAM for the new digital services must become a standard capability. Managing customer identities at various places will lead to disruption and a negative user experience (UX) for the customers. Adding IAM capabilities to each and every service will add cost to developing such services, increase their time-to-market, and will inevitably result in limited services deployed in silos.
To succeed in Digital Transformation, businesses need a strong digital identity backend that delivers all identity services required by the new digital services that are created. Such backend forms the “Identity Fabric” that provides all services in a standardized manner and, beyond that, integrates back to legacy IAM. Identity Fabrics are focused on delivering a scalable, comprehensive set of identity services to developers and to the users of digital services, and form the core of modern IAM.
Businesses can’t wait for their legacy IAM to deliver the identity services they need in Digital Transformation. Businesses can’t wait for their legacy IAM to transform into a modern Identity Fabric. And businesses can’t afford ending up with uncoordinated identity silos across their digital services. Identity Fabrics help in rapidly delivering the unified identity service backend while allowing for migration, integration, and re-use of existing legacy IAM in a phased program, without affecting the ability to deliver what is needed for success in Digital Transformation.
ForgeRock is an established player in the IAM market, delivering the elements required for setting up such an Identity Fabric. With strong API support, high scalability and the ability to manage all types of identities, including devices and things (based on specific IoT support), ForgeRock can provide the layer that businesses need for speeding up their Digital Transformation: An Identity Fabric.
