Enabling the Digital Business with Identity for the Internet of Things

Ubiquitous IoT is pushing organizations to create new digital services while simultaneously expanding the identity problem far beyond employees and customers. Each connected “thing” needs a unique digital identity, controlled access, and well-managed relationships to humans, systems, and other devices. Without strong capabilities for device onboarding/offboarding, asset and device management, and relationship tracking (such as who owns, uses, or temporarily controls a device), IoT environments quickly become ungovernable and unsafe—especially as attacks on IoT are already a reality and many use cases are sensitive or critical.

Traditional IAM approaches are insufficient because IoT introduces vast scale (often far more devices than people), deep heterogeneity across industries, and complex relationship patterns like delegation and lending. IoT use cases differ fundamentally across domains—wearables, connected vehicles, healthcare, smart cities, retail, logistics—so success requires both flexible technology and strong domain understanding. Examples highlight how identity and access underpin safety and operational integrity: connected vehicles comprise many interconnected components that require controlled access across multiple parties; healthcare relies on mobile connected devices and telemedicine flows tied to patients and clinicians; retail depends on pervasive connected scanners and logistics devices.

To address these challenges, a modern “Identity Fabric” approach is proposed: modular, microservice-based, API-driven IAM that integrates with IoT platforms, gateways, industrial control systems, and sometimes directly with devices. Accenture positions Memority as a purpose-built Identity Fabric for IoT and digital transformation, emphasizing scalable identity and relationship management, flexible deployment models, comprehensive APIs, fine-grained permissions, identity vetting, and temporary delegation. Selecting the right platform requires careful use-case analysis and interdisciplinary teams combining IAM, IoT, and industry expertise.

• IoT environments include connected sensors, healthcare instruments, vehicle components, wearables, light bulbs, and traffic lights.
• IoT devices can communicate with other things, apps on smartwatches and smartphones, and backend systems.
• Attacks on IoT are already a reality.
• Connected vehicles have become reality over the past year.
• Major incidents have occurred involving self-driving vehicles and hacks to connected vehicles, affecting safety.
• Vehicles are complex systems of connected components, including brakes, engine control, and multimedia systems.
• Vendors commonly control access to critical vehicle configurations via central backend control systems.
• In healthcare, nurses and doctors carry connected medical devices into patient rooms to collect data and transfer it to backend systems.
• Retail environments use connected devices from in-store stock tracking scanners to logistics.
• Differences across IoT environments persist due to varying standards, missing standards, and legacy standards not designed for modern IoT.

• “Securely connecting IoT devices, providing seamless access to and from these devices, and managing the relationships between humans - such as the customer - and the device is a daunting task.”
• “Managing the devices, their digital identities, and the relationships is one of the essential capabilities.”
• “Standard IAM does not deliver to this.”
• “A major challenge is that there is no such thing as "the" IoT.”
• “IoT is not a no-brainer.”
• “The options are myriad.”
• “It is apparent that failure in this area is as much about safety as it is in the systems controlling a connected vehicle and impacting the safety of traffic.”
• “Managing the relationships between different identities is at the very core of the concept of Identity Fabrics, delivering a unified perspective on capabilities and services required to provide seamless yet secure and controlled access for everyone and everything to every service.”
• “When talking about IoT, it is not anymore about a few thousand or maybe even hundreds of thousands of employees, or some million customers and consumers.”
• “Building the right team is the critical success factor, amongst having the right foundation in technology in place.”