Identity for the Business: Identity Fabrics supporting the Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation has accelerated and broadened from early leaders like retail and finance to virtually every industry, pushed in particular by connected devices and IoT. As business becomes hyperconnected, employees, partners, customers, consumers, devices, and “things” form tightly interwoven networks, and Identity and Access Management (IAM) must evolve to support every identity type and the relationships between them. Traditional IAM approaches struggle because they are often on-premises (limiting flexibility), keep employee and customer identity stacks segregated (creating redundancy and inefficiency), and commonly fail to manage IoT devices and their linkage to individuals. The result is a need for elastic, cloud-based deployment models that can scale to massively larger identity populations.

As digital identities move to the center of digital services, IAM shifts from a supporting IT function to a core business capability. Business models increasingly revolve around ongoing customer relationships and subscriptions rather than one-time product sales, which raises the stakes for consistent identity experiences, access control, consent, and privacy. Success therefore requires IAM evolution to proceed in lockstep with business transformation, changing expectations for vendors, consultancies, and integrators from primarily technical delivery to business-driven transformation support.

The proposed future-state paradigm is the “Identity Fabric”: an integrated, capability-based approach that provides consistent identity services for everyone and everything to access every service, seamlessly and in a controlled way. Identity Fabrics emphasize centralized identity services exposed via APIs so digital services can reuse standardized registration, authentication, relationship, and privacy-related capabilities. Key business benefits include consistent experiences, faster time-to-value for new digital services, and stronger security and privacy through centralization.

Accenture Memority is positioned as an early Identity Fabric-aligned IDaaS platform, offering broad IAM capabilities, strong IoT support, and a comprehensive identity API layer, complemented by Accenture’s transformation expertise. An action plan is outlined: clarify business requirements, define an Identity Fabric-based architecture, build an identity services layer with digital product teams, select core tooling and complements, and ensure elastic deployment for large-scale IoT scenarios.

• Digital Transformation began roughly 20 years ago during what was called the “New Economy.”
• IAM historically has two roots: employee access management and X.500-style customer directories in telecommunications.
• Many IAM solutions are still commonly run on premises rather than delivered as cloud “as-a-service.”
• Employee and customer identity management commonly remain segregated in both technology and process.
• Customer-focused identity systems commonly fail to manage connected devices and their relationships to individuals.
• Digital services in automotive can shift from selling vehicles to providing customer services that may not require car ownership.
• Energy models include “prosumers” who both consume and produce electricity and feed power back to utilities.
• Smart grid scenarios require managing smart meter device identities and their relationship to customer identities.
• Accenture Memority became part of Accenture in 2017 after starting as an independent software vendor.
• Accenture Memority supports IDaaS IGA and IDaaS AM use cases, including provisioning, access governance, SSO, and adaptive authentication.

• “Identity Management must shift from decentralized, technical capabilities to supporting the demands of today’s digital business.”
• “Identity Management is more than an IT exercise.”
• “Identity Management has become a business challenge, with digital identities becoming a central capability of every digital service.”
• “IAM has a simple job to do: Provide access for everyone and everything to every service. Seamless and controlled.”
• “Identity Fabrics not only manage identities and their access to existing and new applications, but provide Identity Services for consumption by digital services.”
• “It is at last time to rethink IAM and rebuild it for the needs of the business in the age of the Digital Transformation.”
• “Accenture Memority, amongst other capabilities, has a strong focus on providing a consistent and comprehensive API layer as part of its solution.”
• “It is time to move IAM from the technical IT level to the business level, supporting the Digital Transformation initiatives in the business and providing a consistent and comprehensive set of Identity Services to the business.”