KuppingerCole Blog

Thales, a global provider of advanced technology solutions, with more than 80,000 employees worldwide, and an established business unit for Digital Identity and Security, has announced the acquisition of OneWelcome, one of the leading European providers of CIAM (Consumer IAM). While the acquisition will provide OneWelcome with a go-to-market capability on a global scale, there are interesting options beyond that. OneWelcome delivers CIAM and B2B management capabilities, consent management, authentication support, and policy-based access control. Thales, on the other hand, has a variety...

Recently deepfakes made a splash in the headlines: Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kiev held one-on-one virtual interviews with several European leaders – or so they thought. In the days following the interviews, it came to light that the Ukrainian official was not actually conducting the interviews, but an unknown party had presented a false representation of Klitschko – with possibilities ranging from a real-time deepfake to a re-edited version of existing video footage called “shallow fakes” – that lasted approximately 15 minutes. One of the interviewees...

Digital engagement is a key driver of economic growth, but the lack of reusable, verified identities is a significant problem that needs to be solved. At present, there is no way for anyone to get a single, verified identity that can be used to interact with government services, employers, health providers, and other service providers around the world. The digital economy is being held back by the lack of any means to provide trust in identity transactions, to ensure that individuals are who they claim to be, and to verify that the origin and destination of identity attributes are...

Human imagination is like a box with a wide range of ideas: every person could imagine different things, but as a society it is common to picture outstanding scenarios where the species would achieve amazing progress. For instance, some movies like X-Machina or Bicentennial Man envisioned a future where relationships between robots and people are possible, and implanted the idea of machines having consciousness and feelings towards others. We probably looked at these films as impossible scenarios, but what happens when reality overlaps with fiction? A few days ago, many people around...

The world of working is changing – we are increasingly working collaboratively in teams, but members of those teams are no longer necessarily in the same office, location, or even the same organization. But all forms of collaborative work require team members to share data, and in the face of rampant data theft, secure collaboration is essential. To remain competitive, organizations need to ensure that employees are able to communicate and exchange data easily and securely with authorized internal and external collaborators, wherever they may be in the world. Increasingly,...

As the intensity and sophistication of cyber-attacks, and the complexity of business IT environments continue to increase amid an ongoing worldwide shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals and a growing number of data protection regulations, many organizations are looking to security automation as a potential solution. As machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence have matured, security automation has become increasingly practical, but at the same time it has become increasingly necessary to stem the tide of cyber-attacks that thanks to the same AI technologies...

Aside from the convergence of decentralized and centralized identities and the return of policy-based access controls, here is my #3 on the list of hot topics at EIC 2022: Identity proofing & fraud reduction. These are two closely related topics, with fraud covering not only the initial proof of an identity, but also the recurring access and user behavior. Massive market uptake We have seen a massive uptake in both fields, with identity proofing also having a close link to decentralized identities and the reusable proofs in identity wallets. Identity proofing as the reliable...

Following my recent blog post on trending topics at EIC 2022, where I discussed the integration of decentralized and centralized identities, there are other topics I’d like to highlight. My #2 on the list of outstanding topics at EIC 2022, is the return of policy-based IAM. More than a decade ago, XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language) was a trending topic, as a standard that allows applications to send a request to an authorization server at run-time. The server then checked this request and either granted or revoked access (or granted access with restrictions)....

Cybersecurity has never been more important or challenging. A worldwide shortage of people with the necessary cybersecurity skills is coinciding with increasing complexity of business IT environments and the further industrialization of the cybercrime industry alongside an increase in state-sponsored cyber threats. Cyber-attacks have continued to intensify and diversify as the attack surface has expanded with organizations increasingly adopting cloud-based services, mobile and home working, and internet-connected devices (IoT and IIoT) as part of accelerated digital transformation...

At this year’s European Identity & Cloud Conference (EIC 2022) that we hosted in Berlin from May 10 th to 13 th , some topics stood out from all the vibrant discussions and enlightening presentations. My #1 topic is the emergence of integration between decentralized identity (DID) - also referred to Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) or as verifiable credentials - and traditional, centralized IAM (Identity & Access Management) and CIAM (Consumer IAM). DID has been a hot topic at EIC for many years, but more as an innovation that is somewhat separate from traditional IAM....