Converging IAM Solutions AND Reducing Complexity

Welcome to this cooking, a Cole video block post. My name is Matthias. I'm not I'm director of practice. I am here at Koa Cole, and I want to talk to you about converging. I am solutions and reducing complexity. So we're talking about, I am solutions that are already in existence, and that requires some changes. So first having a look at IAM today, there are IAM identity and access management solutions in place in almost any organization.

So they are bridging the gap between HR and procurement for external workforce and moving these identities resulting from these source systems over into an IM solution. And from that on to target applications where accounts and authorizations are provisioned to, and these real life IM solutions are in place for quite some time, many years. And they are typically as I've described rooted in traditional enterprise IAM systems. So they are focused on employees. They are focused maybe on externals on temporary workforce, but that is the focus giving access to traditional systems.

And they have undergone various generations and the processes for moving from one incarnation of an IAM solution, maybe with one vendor, two other solutions with other vendors with extended functionality. So projects, new versions, software changes, added functionality, and all this of course often requires additional functionality being custom built for these solutions. So workflows integrations with source systems integrations with target systems, provisioning, manual processes, integration into ITSM, all this is complex. It's difficult to maintain and it's typically expensive as well.

So there is a team that does that for you. They are highly specialized, often well paid, and they have to do lots of work to keep this IM system running. And IM today sometimes does not even meet the requirements of today because they are rapidly changing. And just to have a short look at that, you have to adapt an IAM solution in these times to modern architecture and deployment scenarios. So things are really changing. We are not on premise anymore. So there are new types of architectures and we are in a platform world.

So we are using infrastructure as a service like AWS, like Microsoft Azure, serverless deployments containers. So we are really no longer typically only on an on premise environment. So it's really changing. We are going hybrid. And the key word also is here platform, world. So we are using many services just being provided as APIs. All this comes with a large group of new accounts or new types and new amounts of accounts. So we are talking about customers because they are talking to our target systems as well. We are talking about edge computing devices.

We are talking about partners, which need to be onboarded quickly and sometimes very rapidly on and off boarded. We have new types of contractors. We are talking about identities of software, of endpoint devices of mobile phones. And we are talking about much more. For example, when we are talking about DevOps, we are consuming everything as a service because this buzzword Analyst, buzzword digital transformation is actually changing the enterprise. It and we are moving towards this service model.

And traditional IAM is typically something that cannot fully keep up with that cannot fully cope with the functionalities required. So many organizations have ended up being stuck between an outdated I am and the requirements from business from governance, from compliance to have a new set of functionality being in place. So how can we get there? The idea that we at cooking a coal are encouraging to use is the concept of the identity fabric. And this is really general view at everything being connected to every identity.

So if we have, as an example to the left consumers, partners and employees, because they of course still remain. So we still will have employee IAM, but we will have much more and to the right, all the systems that we need to connect to from legacy. So from on-premise, maybe we are still there at least a bit, but also federated systems. So systems that use different types of identities coming from other trusted services up to the cloud.

And the idea is to really make sure that all employees, all partners, all identities have access to all the systems in the way that these systems understand well. And traditional enterprise IM can be a part of that, but it is not capable of fulfilling all the needs that are required here. So we have to get to something that we call the identity fabric, a set of well defined IAM services that together Form the foundation to bring all these bits and pieces together, to allow every identity, get access to every service they are required to.

And they are entitled to a very quick look at the complete picture. And the idea again, is to understand how to bring things together. And the main approach here is to understand existing IM solutions, what they provide, what you require.

So have a, a matching between what is there, what is required gap analysis, and to understand what needs to be extended. So modify and extend an IAM landscape in place. Maybe you have even different IAM systems. So you can clearly understand which functionality is provided best by which component. So you really have a more service oriented point of view, bringing it all together in one concept, understanding what is missing, extending it in place. So changing the house while living in it, that is the idea.

So legacy IM might be for a very long time, a very important component of such a system, but it needs to be understood as a system that provides services that might be extended, might be replaced, might be augmented with new services that are capable of providing the new functionality for everything that I described before. So it's really important to get to this service point of view. And as I mentioned before, the API aspect is very important. So if you have services and you have a well defined set of secure identity APIs, you are capable of tying things together.

So APIs as the glue between the different building blocks, connecting customers, partners, employees, devices, and whatever, you have to all the services that you have today and will have tomorrow and that business demands for. So that is very important to have this connect and to get all the services together in the quality and the security and in the scalability that you require.

So this is really the central platform in the middle of your legacy systems, to the bottom, to all the new services that you want to provide, and that you want to use new digital services from the cloud and for the cloud, but also software as a services solution that needs different type of identity and access management as well. So all this needs to be well understood and understood in building blocks. And if we then implement that, so that is the part to the right, the technical architecture.

The more you are capable of putting the individual services Into well defined services here represented as microservices and put them where they need to be or where they can be, be it a local data center, be it a private cloud, a public cloud or wherever. So then you can really scale things up and get away from this existing old IAM paradigm towards a more modern, complete service oriented API focused, secure, and scalable IAM landscape to sum it up. The identity fabric, as I described before, is the tool to converge IAM architectures and to make them more functionality complete.

So we are looking at services in a holistic identity paradigm, which is really different from the traditional monolithic IAM system. It provides all required capabilities, all required capabilities for today, and it's capable of being extended augmented for future use cases. We separate architecture from technology and from vendors and products, which is really important. So vendors and products are very late in the process of designing that first, define what you want and then try to identify where to implement it and how, and all this concept is hybrid and interconnected by design.

So really a more modern architecture and deployment scenario. I hope this was helpful for you. Thank you for your time. Bye bye.