Hybrid. It’s Never Only One Thing

Thank you so much. Well, it's great to be here virtually at this very hybrid conference.

You know, I, it looks like we all need a lot of flexible deployment options in terms of going to conferences, traveling and the rest of it. So I hope to join you all next year in person, but, you know, I wanna talk about the nature of hybrid.

You know, it's funny, I made this little subtitle green, you know, we are not often in a green field and enterprises face so many opportunities that drive the need for identity and it can be quite complex sometimes. So I wanna talk about those drivers, first of all. So for the last decade, identity has had sort of a king and that king has been security. Let's call it protection. But I think for at least a decade, we've recognized that there's something else that has ascended to royalty. If you will, and that's experience personalization, I'm just gonna make a mnemonic.

Everything's gonna start with a P. So, you know, thinking about balancing these two has, has been forcing us, I think, to make a false choice, we have to do both. And it's sort of like, you want a bouncer in an impeccably, turned out tuxedo who can let in the legitimate patrons, but also kick the bad guys to the curb much like Jackie Chan here. And of course he's wearing ant tuxedo. So it seems even better.

So, but I wanna dive a little bit deeper. And since this is EIC and it's me, I wanna introduce a new ven, actually not an entirely new ven, but there's some new elements to it. This one even starts by looking like a V. So the basics kind of look like this, you know, protection really stands for security.

It's, it's about managing risk. It's about authenticating. It's about authorizing and it's ensuring regulatory compliance.

But, and so that's where we, you know, we have the concerns about bad password hygiene and stolen credentials and unknown user privileges. So that's kind of the world of worrying if you will. But on the other side, we have personalization which stands for marketing, selling goods and services, giving great experiences, and, you know, consumers can be delighted from this. Employees can get more efficient and I hope they're also delighted from this, but this is where we worry about disjointed consumer experiences across channels, for example.

And, and it's where we worry about, you know, that clunky registration experience that puts people off doc was just talking about an entire universe of that, you know, shopping cart, abandonment. We've got too many of those.

So, but notice there's a lot going on in that a B intersection, privacy and trust really require both elements. Okay. So let's add something here. What about the actual business of business for anybody who didn't see the Lego movie that's president business or Lord business identity has a role to play here as well. So I wanna add another set, another dimension to capture payment. So keeping in the P theme here, what does that really look like? So digital identity has been essential to payments payment related scenarios, paying, getting paid, just actual transactions.

If you think about where we got the word account from in identity, it's actually from bank accounts. So this gives a little extra color to the scenarios already appearing here for payment, for the business of business. All of those things in the green bar are really important and it's essential for trade, which appears in that ABC now, inter intersection, by the way, you'll hear a little bit later about some new work going on with the gain project. And that's kind of related to this dimension, but let's add one more set here.

So yeah, especially in this era of hybrid work hybrid retail, remote versions of everything, we have to pay attention to this final dimension people. And you might say, well, haven't we been paying attention to it all along well, regulations pay a lot of attention to it, but you know, I, I kind of wanted dedicate this category to doc circles.

You know, who, who has always been so eloquent in defense of people, of all kinds, individual people of all kinds, and in particular personal versions of all of these drivers for identity, people want to connect, people want to share. And if we take a look at all the things covered by this people bar here, people want a lot of the same things that businesses do just on their own behalf. So if you take a look at each of these intersections, each one of these is actually hybrid scenario. It's never only one thing, right? So there's a lot for us to accomplish, but there's also challenges.

And so we can actually recognize these challenges as the enemies of it, if you will. So, you know, cloud is a big part of the story of hybridness hybridity, but it's not the only thing.

It, it, it's never only one thing. And you realize that when you take a look at the factors of time and distance and vacuum gaps that can plague us in it. So let's take a look at each one of these and see what they're about.

So time, time comes with change. Sometimes the change is planned like digital transformation of the sort that Jackson was talking about. Sometimes it's unplanned, you know, I think the last maybe year and a half or so was not entirely planned. And so we just had some surprises. And over the years, you kind of build up a long tail of technologies that have to work together. It all kind of sediments down. So what was once innovative becomes mainstream or was once mainstream can become commoditized, but here's the key. Nothing ever goes away.

So you gotta deal with it and it can often be providing a lot of value for your business. Now, the second thing is distance.

You know, the world's made a lot of progress sort of becoming digital, but even with that physical distance matters, it matters a lot. If you multiply time challenges by distance challenges, you can kind of see on the left here, the, the hybrid reality of what we're trying to do in the digital world, you know, an awful lot of enterprises are represented by these numbers and not everybody is in the cloud or in the cloud all the way.

So, you know, what does that look like? It's, you know, it's a relative term.

Actually, you might be in different spots on this journey. You might have decided to stand pat in one place or another.

So, so what are the inhibitors to sort of going full cloud complex legacy, mission, critical systems that are running on prem? For example, you might have regulatory or other special risk considerations. Let's call this maybe the protection mandate keeping you sort of at the top left there a little bit. So if that's you then hybrid might look like moving from physical hardware to a private cloud. For starters, what are the accelerators? The accelerators might be a cloud first business imperative for digital transformation, for other reasons, for efficiency.

And, you know, we might call this a personalization mandate if you're, if you're sort of business forward about your moves. So if this is you, you might be moving pretty quickly, relatively thoroughly, and you might be looking for partners who have the same sensibility.

So, but no matter your circumstances, you still need identity to infuse your entire operation. So how really do you do that?

Well, you kind of need identity context everywhere, and that's where vacuum becomes a problem. Killer gaps are everywhere.

So, you know, for reasons of protection, personalization, payment, and people identity needs to be the ultimate bridge. And yet the gaps between servers, between applications, between authorization policies, between data sources, between your resources that you need to protect. Those can present a real problem. So it's necessary to integrate and translate and connect identity with, with all of the systems, including the ones that are physically far apart, including the ones whose origins are lost in the midst of time.

And you know, this is where for rock and the for rock identity cloud can play a role. So for example, if you're still running applications on physical machines means you have legacy applications, they're critical to your business. They've been customized the way you run. And for these applications, you need an identity platform that integrates with them and still gives you modern capabilities like contact sensitive, authentication. Passwordless authentication these options.

If you're running on virtual machines, well, whether it's in your own data center or private cloud or public cloud service, it means you started on the cloud journey. At least you might be in the first phase of hybrid cloud, but here's where you need to be looking for a platform that can secure your applications wherever they are today. But they still have to give you the flexibility to move to cloud easily, which you may be doing rapidly. And your digital identity platform needs to be able to support today's needs and then grow with you.

If you're already running your applications on cloud infrastructure, then, and you're ready to move more to that model. Then the platform can act as an enabler by giving you the DevOps tooling that you need and make it easy to migrate configurations from one environment to another.

So, you know, scaling up or down with the rest of your applications and even being flexible to run in any cloud. Finally, if you're building cloud native applications, using things like serverless computing, microservices, your digital identity platform needs to support those needs as well.

It needs to understand all of your different identity types, whether it's privileged accounts, service accounts, APIs, it needs to be runable as a microservice closest to your other services to protect them in that zero trust fashion, where you, where you think about your protect services and provides consistent service at any scale. So I wanted to share a few proof points about how we at for rock actually help customers kind of vanquish the enemies of it.

So yeah, you want to slay time, distance, and vacuum, and you want to enable all of these great use cases. Some of them very hybrid use cases. So here's just three examples of how some folks are doing it. Collaboro is a really interesting example. It's a B2B SAS service for workforce engagement. They're offering has tenants in a lot of geographies.

And so, you know, they were looking to extend the same capabilities to their on-premises customers, and naturally they wanted a great omnichannel customer experience based on context. And this is where they were looking for a single platform to sup support a global B to B to C market with SA. And by the way, they were able to free up an entire development team in the doing to focus on building new capabilities for customers. Second example, AGU. Now in Europe, you might not be familiar with them, but they're the American geophysical union.

And they were one of those folks who faced an in-person conference that had to very rapidly turn into in their case, an entirely virtual conference. It wasn't even hybrid at that point, if you look back at fall of 2020, so yeah, familiar story.

So, and of course they had to give everybody a great experience and capture a lot of analytics so they could understand their members' needs. So they're using for drop to accept requests for users to move platforms, evaluate authentication, and authorization and redirect them with the appropriate credentials. And the last example that I wanna give you is MERS, which is, you know, fantastic company. Logistics is actually fantastically complex, and it's a vital service as I think we all now realize as we've all become more and more and more aware of supply chain logistics.

So they frequently handle cargo that is dangerous. Maybe climate controlled, highly regulated think about like car batteries and they can't just sort of treat it as a well, we got it at point a and we delivered it at point Z, are you happy? They have to update all of the vendors and partners and customers along the way, pretty frequently. So they needed to make their core platform services easily configurable to handle those inevitable complexities and agility that they needed for their business. So new flows for new personas are, are, are par for the course for them.

I wanna briefly just share a couple of numbers, some hard data about what they achieved me. They're operating 134 countries, 15 countries that have 76 ports, and they achieved about a four times improvement on, on the latency that they were experiencing going back and forth. For example, between EU and China, for mobile authentic authentication, COIO has hundreds of B2B SAS tenants, and that's in addition to on-prem and they were really looking for whatever capabilities they're using in the cloud. It had to be available in an on-prem version.

And then finally, AGU, we're talking about 50,000 customers interacting with nine platforms. And by the way, they sourced and managed that entire project in, in three months.

Finally, many of our customers are actually seeing 25 to 80% reductions in architecture, design and planning time. So that just means you can plow all that back into your work, on differentiation, into your core competencies, to make things better for your customers. I wanna just conclude briefly by asking the question, you know, if I am, can be built for the hybrid world, you know, life is messy, but identity shouldn't be messy. And I think this is kind of a theme of what Jackson was talking about.

If it thinks about you as an enterprise and your needs for protection, personalization, payment, and people serving people, what are the opportunities for that? So with that, I want to conclude and thank you for your time and just mention that I actually provided a template of that big VIN with the four sets in it, in case anybody wants to play with it. So you can go check out the slides and let me know what you think. Reach out. Thank you.