Identity Orchestration: How to drive digital transformation, modernize security, and innovate
By Mike Vesey, Founder and CEO of IdRamp
2022 will go down as a particularly challenging year for the technology sector. The layoff tracking website Layoffs.fyi reports that more than 100,000 tech workers have been let go in 2022, with 35,000 laid off in the month of November alone, and the number is only expected to grow before the year ends.
The growth of the tech sector as a whole may be showing signs of a slowdown, but the businesses that will make it through these challenging economic times are the ones that are still asking their teams to do more, but with less — less time, fewer resources, and less headcount.
The companies that will continue to outpace their competitors during this time are the ones that won’t let up on the drive for continuous transformation and will continue to innovate, adopt new products, and deliver new services. These are the companies that will continue to find new ways to prepare for future innovation and will make smart technology choices. And even with a smaller workforce, they’ll expect their teams to deliver everything on time and under budget, all while defending against new security threats and rising to meet the newest mandates for zero trust architecture.
All this pressure can create a messy situation — technologically speaking. How can an enterprise company optimize, shore up technical debt, and secure their current tech stacks today without taking their eye off digital transformation and preparing for future growth?
As overwhelming as this may sound, there are services that can help with outsourcing some of these challenges and provide an easy bridge between existing legacy systems and new, innovative technologies. One such service is identity orchestration.
Identity orchestration is a flexible service, built on open standards, that helps enable technology consolidation and coordination. This no-code, interoperable solution makes it possible to streamline the delivery of new services while reinforcing security needs with the latest cybersecurity protocols. This addresses both current identity integration and security challenges, while preparing for future needs all in one.
A recent Gartner report recommended organizations should “evolve their identity and access management (IAM) infrastructure to be more secure, resilient, composable and distributed.” and this evolution should involve the establishment of an “identity fabric using a standards-based connector framework across multiple computing environments, so that the organization can answer the question of who has access to what, regardless of where the resources and users are located.” This means that the creation of an orchestrated and unified platform allows companies that may currently be scrambling to keep up with new threats, to create a more comprehensive, coherent, and adaptive IAM system.
Identity orchestration platforms are used to connect a plethora of disparate services and systems while making it easy to implement things like biometrics, two-factor authentication (2FA), multi-factor authentication (MFA), passwordless login, access policy, verifiable credentials and more.
A full-featured identity orchestration service also makes it easy to plug in any source of identity, (Azure Active Directory, Okta, G Suite, ForgeRock to name a few) and connect it to any service or application. These can be destinations used for things like collaboration tools, learning management resources, customer and employee portals, and more. Once they are plugged in, it is simple to route them through a control center that is protected using the most secure zero trust architecture.
Shrinking talent pools and lower budgets may not be going away anytime soon. Adopting identity orchestration services will help meet your needs of today while helping you build a bridge to the future.
