Radiant Logic and the Identity Integration Imperative

Short Summary

Digital transformation is dramatically increasing the volume, variety, and velocity of identity data enterprises must manage, while regulators are raising liability for safeguarding, collecting, retaining, accessing, and ensuring the accuracy of identity data. Many organizations’ existing IAM infrastructures have not kept pace, creating “identity infrastructure debt” that slows deployment, increases costs, and introduces hidden risks that can surface suddenly. Because every digital system relies on identity for access control, weak enterprise-wide identity data management becomes a constraint on business agility and a growing compliance exposure.

An “integrated identity data” capability is presented as the way out: it provides a comprehensive view of identity data, keeps it consistent across all systems where it is created or used, and enforces enterprise-wide policies for identity data collection, protection, and use aligned with compliance and business obligations. Achieving this requires a core IAM component with four groups of functional requirements: high-performance and highly available database capabilities at massive scale; person-centric data modeling and flexible schema evolution; synchronization (“virtual ETL”) including identity resolution/matching and attribute transformation; and broad connector support plus strong integration with incumbent IAM and related components.

Several scenarios illustrate value: accelerating and de-risking mergers and acquisitions by avoiding massive account replication and complex pairwise integrations; simplifying hybrid on-prem/cloud IAM by centralizing access to authoritative attributes while keeping operations distributed; and mitigating privacy risk (GDPR/CCPA) by enabling a normalized view of identity data, powering privacy portals, and supporting enterprise-wide data inventory.

Radiant Logic’s RadiantOne suite is mapped to these requirements through a virtualized, logically centralized/operationally distributed architecture using HDAP, correlation and synchronization, and cloud federation capabilities. The recommended approach is to pursue integrated identity in a way that simultaneously advances privacy compliance and business agility, with cross-functional sponsorship, incremental delivery, and a shared inventory of identity data holdings and uses.

Interesting Facts

• The WannaCry ransomware attack in 2017 compromised 200,000 unpatched Windows computers across 150 countries.
• The GDPR entered into force in April 2018.
• The California Consumer Privacy Act was described as coming into effect in 2020 with requirements retroactive to January 2019.
• It has been estimated that 45–60% of expected benefits from mergers and acquisitions are directly dependent on IT integration.
• IT integration factors have been cited as the third most important reason for merger failures.
• Radiant Logic was founded in 2000 and pioneered the concept of the virtual directory.
• RadiantOne FID includes HDAP, described as a Hadoop-based data store holding an instantiated copy of identity data from multiple sources.
• Vendor-published results claim a single HDAP 3-node cluster can process 120,000 queries per second with 50–100 million user identities.
• Radiant Logic claims a ten-times advantage in efficiency of add/delete transactions versus widely deployed LDAPv3 products.
• RadiantOne CFS supports federation protocols including SAML 2, WS-Federation, OAuth 2, and OpenID Connect.

Notable Quotes

• “The days of constructing each and every customer-facing app, application and portal independently, with separate management of identities, privacy, consent, and access, are past.”
• “Build your organization and processes to handle consumer identities and their consent and privacy centrally.“
• “Integrated identity is not just a nice-to-have anymore.”
• “Big Data has arrived!”
• “In the digital enterprise, business stops if the IAM infrastructure fails.”