Commissioned by Accenture
1 Management Summary
With the ubiquitous IoT, organizations are facing new challenges in creating new digital services. Securely connecting IoT devices, providing seamless access to and from these devices, and managing the relationships between humans - such as the customer - and the device is a daunting task.
Managing the devices, their digital identities, and the relationships is one of the essential capabilities. This includes advanced features around delegation, e.g., for lending of devices, onboarding and identity vetting of users, and the ability to scale to the millions of users and even more IoT devices that might be in scope of the business case.
Standard IAM does not deliver to this. There is a need for modern IAM approaches, such as the Identity Fabric, with modular and modern architectures. APIs for integrating with IoT platforms and gateways are essential, as well as for interfacing to the digital services.
Technology, on the other hand, is just one part of the answers. Understanding the business cases and the specific of the respective industries is essential to success. Healthcare, smart cities, retail, logistics, or automotive all have their IoT use cases - but none of these industries is equal to others. Thus, aside of a technical platform that is flexible and extensible to serve the technical needs of different industries, there is - again - a need for a flexible and comprehensive set of APIs to integrate with industry-specific solutions, as well as a need for partners that deliver more than just an IAM platform.
The business domain knowledge in consulting and system integration is required to provide solutions that fit to the need of the customer. Only by having "interdisciplinary" teams bringing together domain knowledge, IoT knowledge, IAM knowledge, and the ability to create modern digital services will turn out into solutions that deliver the business value to the customer, on time.
Accenture combines an IoT-ready IAM platform, following the principles of a modern Identity Fabric, with the knowledge about IoT, about business domains, and about creating digital business services. This makes Accenture Memority as the IAM solution an interesting foundation for delivering to the needs of organizations utilizing IoT devices in their digital transformation journey.
