Identity Fabrics - Connecting Anyone to Every Service

Digital business has moved far beyond 1990s-style e-commerce into complex, distributed, multi-party models where employees, partners, service providers, customers, devices, and automated processes both consume and provide services. Access now occurs from virtually any location, spanning on-premises data centers, cloud environments, and mobile systems, dissolving the traditional “inside vs. outside” corporate network perimeter. This shift changes how communication, collaboration, and value delivery work, and it forces IT architectures to evolve to support new business models, new partner/customer channels, and rapidly expanding cloud and mobile computing.

In this environment, treating identities (employees, customers, partners, devices) as isolated entities is no longer viable. Identity and Access Management (IAM) becomes foundational not only for security, governance, and audit, but also for usability and user satisfaction—yet requirements are diverse and sometimes conflicting. Organizations must quickly integrate different identity types (especially consumers), support bring-your-own-identity approaches, allow preferred devices, provide secure access regardless of location, model relationships among identities (teams, families, partner organizations), integrate trusted external identities, enable transactions and payments, comply with laws and regulations, reduce deterring KYC friction, and leverage existing data for analytics and AI—extending beyond people to devices, services, and networks.

Most current IAM implementations only partially meet these demands and are often monolithic and siloed. The proposed answer is an “Identity Fabric”: a logical IAM infrastructure that orchestrates a consistent set of loosely coupled services—delivered via secure APIs across cloud, hybrid, and legacy environments—enabling adaptive authentication, auditing, federation, and dynamic authorization. Implementation should be incremental, architecture-driven, and non-disruptive, reusing and encapsulating components while adding capabilities and replacing unsuitable parts over time under strong strategic oversight.

• Modern digital business models are complex, distributed, multidimensional, and involve many parties in varied roles.
• Access occurs from virtually any location to services spanning on-premises data centers, cloud environments, and mobile systems.
• The classic corporate network boundary between “inside” and “outside” has largely given way to a hybrid IT reality.
• Identity management and permissions are central to security, governance, audit, usability, and user satisfaction.
• Requirements include integrating consumers quickly and securely while keeping the experience user-friendly.
• Bring-your-own-identity is expected so users can retain control over their identity.
• Identity relationships must reflect structures such as teams, companies, families, and partner organizations.
• Many IAM infrastructures are monolithic and difficult to decompose into individual components.
• Achieving an Identity Fabric often requires isolating functional components and exposing interfaces through secure, accessible APIs.
• The transformation to an Identity Fabric can be executed without a disruptive “big bang,” supporting continuous operations.

• “IAM (Identity and Access Management) is the essential security infrastructure for this and at the same time a facilitator of these new services, models and forms of cooperation.”
• “The very idea of a company's outer boundary, the concept of a security perimeter, has practically ceased to exist.”
• “The assumption that previously independent identities (employees, customers, partners, mobile devices, etc.) in an enterprise can be regarded as isolated is no longer valid.”
• “The demands on a future proof IAM are complex, diverse and sometimes even conflicting.”
• “Unfortunately, this is exactly one of the central challenges.”
• “If organizations need to seamlessly give access to all users, wherever they are accessing from, and provide any digital service to these users, the Identity Fabric must be able to securely mediate that very connection between user and service.”
• “To achieve this, we are shifting away from isolated, singular systems to a logical platform that provides and orchestrates a set of required IAM services and related functions.”
• “What they all have in common is that they are always part of a consistent framework of services, capabilities and building blocks as part of a well-defined, loosely coupled overall architecture…”
• “This transformation of your IAM infrastructure into an Identity Fabric does not need to be and is not meant to be disruptive by any means.”
• “Required technological and architectural building blocks are already available and proven reliable.”