RadiantOne: Identity Integration for Zero-Trust and Digital Transformation

Becoming a digital enterprise reshapes every part of an organization: reaching an initial digital operating capability is the hardest milestone, but there is no finish line because ongoing flexibility is required to survive continuous business, social, and technology acceleration. Digitization is compelled by both opportunity and competitive necessity. Success depends on three high-level capabilities—continual innovation, business agility, and security of digitized assets—with corporate IT contributing most strongly to agility and security.

Traditional perimeter-based security began failing as Internet-connected operations expanded: once attackers breach the perimeter, lateral movement can be largely unhindered, and key assumptions (users inside the perimeter, insiders broadly trusted, assets concentrated in a few enterprise-controlled networks) no longer hold. Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA), named in 2011 and formalized by NIST SP 800-207 in 2020, addresses perimeter-less operations by protecting business assets (information and processes) rather than networks. Its core approach is strong authentication plus policy-based, fine-grained authorization so that no protected asset can be accessed or changed without accountable identity and explicit policy permission. This shifts the “perimeter” to identity, enabling mobility and flexible hosting with minimal security reconfiguration, including policy-only changes to support remote work.

ZTA depends on high-quality, integrated data—especially a “subject database” (directory) containing humans and non-person entities and their attributes/privileges—along with inventories of protected resources and enforceable policies. Because most enterprises lack sufficient data maturity, ZTA should be implemented incrementally via pilots and progressively finer-grained controls. Radiant Logic’s RadiantOne suite is presented as a scalable, resilient, logically centralized but physically distributed identity repository (“virtual directory”) that standardizes attributes, synchronizes updates across sources, feeds policy decision points, supports satellite identity providers, and improves agility, compliance reporting, and user experience.

• Zero trust was named in 2011 by Forrester Research analyst John Kindervag.
• NIST published SP 800-207, Zero Trust Architecture, in August 2020.
• Google searches on “zero trust” and related terms grew exponentially starting in spring 2018.
• The Robert Morris worm occurred in November 1988.
• OASIS adopted Version 1.0 of XACML for attribute-based access control in the early 2000s.
• Radiant Logic was founded in 1995 and is headquartered in Novato, California.
• About 85% of Radiant Logic’s customers are in North America.
• Over half of Radiant Logic’s customers have more than $10 billion in annual revenue.
• Radiant Logic customers include 7 of the 10 largest US healthcare providers, 7 of the 10 largest financial institutions, and 6 of the 10 largest insurance companies.
• A client case study reported a 70% reduction in authentication requests processed after using a routing feature for authentication requests.

• “The process of becoming a digital enterprise will affect every aspect of the organization.”
• “There really is no choice other than to engage: digitization is driven by both technological opportunity (a carrot) and competitive necessity (the stick!).”
• “Visionary companies will carve out new strategic options for themselves—those that don't adapt, will fail.”
• “Instead of focusing on protecting the network, ZTA protects essential business assets: information and business processes.”
• “In effect, the core strategy of ZTA is to implement strong authentication and policy-based fine-grained access control, enterprise-wide.”
• “This strategy removes location of both users and protected assets as a limiting factor on business operations.”
• “Authorization is how we approach the ideal of zero implicit trust.”
• “Fine-grained access control shrinks the amount of implicit trust, and associated risk, that the enterprise accepts.”
• “Machine-readable, computable policy information is practically unknown, and developing it will require non-IT policy analysts to learn to translate their complex natural-language knowledge into computable format.”
• “A high-function enterprise-scale directory is necessarily a complex piece of software with many configuration options that affect performance.”