Identity Management and Governance, in a Cloud Native World

So I'll start with something that I know a quote from Shakespeare, what's in a name that we call a rose by any other name, would it smell as sweet a rose? We call a wallet where it smelled like rose. What's in a name. My name is Arron, who are we? Is our identity. Our name is it.

Our DNA, our attributes, our metadata, our beliefs and values. What is, who am I?

Okay, I'm still gonna start with an apology here. Then. Not want to give you guys an existential anxiety. Identity is complicated as we heard. And my name is Aaron and I am a nerd who likes to coach Shakespeare to make a point at this conference. You heard about identity management about cloud first about automation, security models, zero trust context, authentication, authorization, lots and lots of good information. And my favorite AI, lots of ways of doing identity management. There are many challenges that we face I've been doing any management for the last about 20 years. We face silos.

We face dogma politics and we face different people, different organizations, different parts of the organization going in different directions. We hear most projects fail 30 to 70%, depending on who you listen to. And by your own experience, you probably have seen more failures of identity management systems and implementation or inadequate implementation. Then you have seen success. I have.

So again, I'm not telling you anything new here that you, you haven't heard. Oh, I have to. Okay. Sorry. I'm two devices, but yeah, I'm not telling anything that you haven't heard here and I'm not here to profess what is the right way of doing any management? Because there's only one way of doing the identity right way of doing identity management. That is your way it could be attribute based access, role based access, authentication, authorization. How do you get it your way? How do you go to burger king and order stuff and get it? So that's what I'm getting at.

Again, identity management is often called a journey because we stumbled so many times and we kind of got get it sort of right after a while, after so many years of doing this thing. And recently I came, stumbled across by happenstance something called systems theory, identity management, like a lot of other things is best viewed. In my opinion, with a model of systems theory, what is a systems theory?

I mean, it's very fundamental. It's a basic idea is the whole is greater than the sum of it. Part. Let's take an example, baking a cake, you lay out all the ingredients. And if you don't put in the right order, right. Temperature, right way, you do not get a cake, you get ingredients and a mishmash, but to bake a cake, you have to get it right. And if you're like me who like to bake cake with basic raw ingredients, you can count on how many times you have fumbled baking a cake till you get it right. So what does it have to do with cloud native and cloud native?

So let's start with cloud native. And the cloud cloud native is not the cloud cloud. Native is in new way of putting together ingredients to be truly agile. And I wanna talk about how with identity management in identity management, you can take systems theory. You can take baking a cake example of baking a cake and, and fail and fail and fail and eventually get it right. But what is cloud native has to go to do with it? These are some bullet points that you can get on the web, but cloud native is scalable, public private, Mable, resilient, blah, blah, keywords.

I can talk about these technical details, but we have only 20 minutes. This will take a lot of more time, but let's get to this part in cloud native. I talked about having failures before you get success, a cloud, and we've heard of agile. Agile has been in, in discussions for over about 20, 15 to 20 years, started with extreme programming. And now it's DevOps different iterations of agile. You had development, you have operations. And agile says, you keep on failing. You keep on testing and you keep on doing things to get it right.

In 20 years of doing any management, the tools that we were doing, we had agility in our process, but the tools and the infrastructure that we dealt with would not get us the, the failures fast enough, that could, we could be successful. So when we hear identity, management's implementations fails. There are large failures. We are just an iteration into it, but each, each iteration, if it takes six year, six months to a year to keep on iterating a full at any management cycle, yes, it'll consider it as a failure from a leadership quite a few times before you get it right.

And it, the year long project becomes a five year long project to you really get it right? And the software is obsolete by then. So in with the cloud native infrastructure cloud native platform, you get to fail fast. You get to implement full, you get to complete your full implementation cycles. When I say full implementation cycles, I am talking not just about take a pilot, a couple of target systems, or you add a group, a department of people I'm talking about the entire implementation. You start off with building your object model, your subject model. Are you going to have human accounts?

Non-human accounts, you're gonna do role based access, attribute based access, context, access, certifications, all your business processes. The time it takes to implement all of those things. You need tools that work that give you the speed. So you can eventually become agile. And identity management is just catching up to this truly agile cloud native implementations. And I'm talking about full implementation cycles. I'm I'm not talking about months. I'm talking about weeks. You start off with your first draft of your business processes implemented.

You get your certifications, you get your role based access. You get all your fundamentals in, in here, you go ticket online. And then you go at rate every six weeks, EV instead of going from six months, every six weeks, you have a newer version and you are able to go to that success at much faster, faster with cloud native.

Again, cloud native is the raw material for going agile. What does it mean? Let's talk about cloud native. So if you're implementing, if you're selecting systems, few fundamentals, API access, we have to have standards based API. Every single thing that you do, you want to provision an account. You want to create a request. You want to approve a task. Everything. Every API must be supported, cuz my business process and their business process and somebody else's business process, they are going to be different.

I need to have attributes that can go from 50 to 500 without having, without breaking APIs. I need to be able to change my user interface, which is my single page application. Either an or react that's again, cloud native stateless functions, small, small functions, that small programs that just work. They do their job and do their job really well. Think about Linux Unix systems, the grips of the world, the act, these things just work and they only do one thing and they do one thing really well. And you build your system on top of those Lego blocks.

And then the fourth one is schema less data. Data changes. The meaning of data changes.

My name, my attributes, my location, everything is mutable and we don't wanna fight a rigid data. Set cloud data is not just development model. It's also operational containerization. We take the, the functions, make digital containers, get it ready, get it working. Dynamic management, deployment automation, these things again, reducing you have your code change. Your get commit goes in. It goes into your pipeline. Automates goes into development, integration and boom, your, your completed your operations part and everything is about services.

Services does not mean it as cloud services, infrastructure platform, software container. I, I'm not gonna go into all these details, but these are the fundamental building blocks of what we call cloud native. I an example, I'll give you one of the largest clients that we work with. This is a fortune 50 client and they have multi-billion dollar organization, but they could not give us a development environment for three months, ended up going down to Microcenter bought a server and we did the development for them on our machines because they just could not put the infrastructure in time.

And now we're talking about infrastructure as the services. If you need identity management, it's, it's all the infrastructure has to support. And that's the cloud native, all the different aspects of containers, orchestration automation. I'm gonna leave these keywords with you. You can do all your own research, but I'm happy to explore and expand each of these things, how identity management applications, how identity management uses these building blocks to again, deliver a fast fail, fast model to be successful. Cloud native is also culture.

We have seen our traditional waterfall and I think I'm just trying to keep some minutes for question and answer. And then there is maturity metrics. So you have everything in cloud. Native is not an, just an infrastructure or way of development or your operations, your culture, how you design and you produce your product, the team, the architecture, maintenance, operations, these are all different. These are all different aspects of measuring cloud native in there are, you have just like maturity model, 20 years ago, CMMI maturity model. You have maturity model in cloud native.

How about you have different from no process to cloud native with collaborative data events. So this, this information, I have it in my reference and cloud native identity management, all business operations are again available through API. Everything from provisioning, reconcile certified, it has a mature authorization model. Every UI, every click gets authorized. Every API call is authorized. Every event is, has an authorization and auditability.

So did it come in from a LMS system to, or HR system or MI when an approval button got clicked on the user interface and when it a entitlement got provisioned by role, everything is authorized and with a zero trust model, which is basically talking about in the computer science kernel operating system where my kernel space is shrunk and my user space has become big. And if getting a little nerdy on this one about kernel and user space, kernel space, you is your trust circle and being able to extend your authorization model and then being able to deliver your, your cloud native application.

On-prem on infrastructure as a surveys and software as a service, you can read more about cloud native patterns on CN patterns or org and the book. And thank you. I joined joined me for more of this discussion on our monthly webinar and meeting cities.

I, I said, it's called talk nerdy to me. And I'd love to do that.