Modern Identity Fabrics: A Cornerstone of your Digital Strategy

Digital Transformation is fundamentally changing IT by pushing digital identities to the center of business success. Managing and controlling access for everyone—customers, partners, employees, devices, and “things”—to every service is presented as a prerequisite for delivering new digital experiences while meeting privacy, security, and compliance expectations. The core challenge is avoiding fragmented identity silos that arise when each new digital service builds its own IAM, which increases cost, slows time-to-market, and limits capability.

To address this, the text introduces the Identity Fabric: a logical IAM architecture that standardizes delivery of identity services for new digital services while integrating with legacy IAM. Identity Fabrics shift IAM toward programmatic consumption via APIs, making “inside-out” identity services—where applications call identity capabilities directly—more important than traditional “outside-in” IAM that passively manages target systems through their interfaces. This creates demand for Identity API Platforms that expose a comprehensive and consistent API layer spanning directories, identity lifecycle and provisioning, access management, governance, and potentially API security and management. A stable API layer is emphasized to reduce lock-in and support long-lived digital services even as underlying platforms evolve.

The “Legacy Dilemma” frames the coexistence of multiple generations of identity systems (compliance-driven employee IAM, CIAM, and identity for IoT/non-person entities). A multispeed approach—rapid enablement for new services plus gradual legacy integration and migration—is positioned as the practical path forward. ForgeRock is presented as an API-first IAM vendor whose platform, cloud offerings, and modular standards-based architecture can serve as a foundation for building an Identity Fabric, including capabilities for IoT and scalable deployments. The text concludes with a 10-step action plan for defining target state, performing gap analysis, selecting core technologies, establishing a consistent API layer, enabling developers with education and SDKs, and executing phased migration.

• Digital identities are described as moving to the center of attention in Digital Transformation.
• Identity Fabrics provide IAM capabilities for both existing applications and API-based identity services for newly created applications.
• APIs are defined interfaces used to call a service and receive a defined result.
• Traditional IAM is characterized as “outside-in,” while API-based identity consumption is characterized as “inside-out.”
• Identity API Platforms are described as covering services from directory services to identity lifecycle management and access management, with potential inclusion of access governance and API security/management.
• First-generation identity management systems are described as being driven largely by enterprise compliance initiatives and as costly and complex to implement.
• “Customer Identity & Access Management (CIAM)” is identified as a wave built mostly for consumer-facing web applications and often developed in-house.
• ForgeRock is presented as having followed an API-first, platform-centric approach from the beginning.
• ForgeRock launched cloud IAM services called ForgeRock Identity Cloud in the fourth quarter of 2019.
• ForgeRock Identity Cloud is described as running the same code as ForgeRock’s on-premises versions.

• “Digital Identities are moving to the center of attention in the Digital Transformation. Without it, managing customers, partners, devices, or things will not work.”
• “There is a fundamental difference between traditional IAM and identity services supporting new applications: In the latter case, business services actively access identity services, instead of being passively managed.”
• “It is essential to have a comprehensive, stable, consistent API layer on top of the Identity API platform”
• “In the world of Digital Transformation, experience is king.”
• “Identity Fabrics are the logical concept, the umbrella for restructuring IAM into a set of modern services and serving the demand of Digital Transformation initiatives.”
• “Businesses should not wait for their legacy IAM to deliver the identity services they need in Digital Transformation.”
• “Businesses cannot afford to end up with uncoordinated identity silos across their digital services.”
• “Identity Fabrics help in rapidly delivering the unified identity service backend while allowing for migration, integration, and re-use of existing legacy IAM in a phased program, without affecting the ability to deliver what is needed for success in Digital Transformation.”
• “A well-thought-out Identity Fabric should rely on a small number of components.”
• “This embodies the multispeed system approach, which chooses a digital identity backend that adapts quickly to new digital services while gradually but deeply integrating with legacy systems to allow Digital Transformation from the core.”