Interview with Tim Barber

Yes. Thank you. Battle.

And Tim, great to meet you at least virtually again, not that long that we spoke last great presentation. And maybe let's start with one question, which is about, so from the thought for perspective, can you talk a little bit about some of the key requirements for doing an identity fabric, right. Where you already mentioned, there might be more you'd like to bring during the Q and a Yes, certainly.

I mean, it's, I, I think the, the, the thing that a lot of organizations get stuck on is that they try and find the perfect solution and they agonize over decisions around what that perfect solution should look like in, in, in our opinion, thinking about value and how you create value ahead of making an investment and taking on risk is probably the most important decision that you have to make. So it's, it's very, very important to focus on the business outcomes that you're trying to achieve rather than the technology itself.

If you, if you have a clear idea of the business outcomes that you're trying to achieve, then that makes the technology selection a lot easier. And the most important thing from a technology selection is to give you the flexibility to, to drive your business forward. How do you, how do you, how are you going to use identity and access management as a differentiator in the market? I think it's really important that the business and the technologists in an, in a company have an aligned view of what they're trying to achieve.

So, so there, there are two things in your answer, I think are, which are specific interest. One is you're saying, and that's something I would fully agree. Identity is something which was both in your, and a differentiator in digital transformation.

And the, the second element is, are something I agree on the identity fabric helps you in sort of focusing on, on smaller steps, making small, potentially more successful bro check steps by going sort of for one business requirement after the other. Yes, that's, that's a very good way of framing it, Martin it's And the concept of an identity fabric is really about making sure that identity is, is something that is a service that can be consumed in the organization.

You want people who, who are designing applications and designing services and websites and all of the digital channels that, that you want to take out to market. You want them to be able to easily consume identity and access management and security and compliance and privacy and consent. You want those to be consumable services that are easy to deploy, easy to consume, which means that they need to be standards based. They need to be based on open APIs so that they can just be served up it's it becomes, it becomes a tool that people use rather than an objective in its own, right.

That's and exactly the way that you just described so that you, it, it's not holding the business back. It's just there as an enabler to, to launch services and to evolve and to, and to drive business innovation. Could we, could we phrase it the way that if you want to be at trial in what you do in your digital transformation, your identity management project, you need such an approach.

Yes, you do. You know, which is why, you know, at, for drop, we've worked very, very hard on making the, the various different services related to identity and access management consumable in, in bite size chunks. Agility is a very good way of framing it.

You, you don't want it to be something which is anything other than just a consumable service right. Across your business.

And, And when you look at it from, from your customer perspective. So I think many, if not, all organizations are affected by the current crisis are pushed to, to speed up their digital transformation. And I think many businesses have flow under the hardware.

Also, we have to do our digital transformation with doing virtual conferences instead of our flex went EIC. So, so what is your perspective on, on, on your customers or from your customers?

How, how is this, how they are they perceive, or how do you perceive the current challenges and the changes in the markets do, do you already see changes in the way your customers are addressing their, their, their identity management initiatives, more towards digital transformation and for maybe traditional I am administrator approach?

Well, so, I mean, one, one thing to note is that I think people are actually accelerating spend on identity and access management at the moment, which perhaps is a little bit counterintuitive, you know, as you, we see people anticipating potentially an economic downturn, generally, that means that people start to spend less money. But if anything, we're seeing the opposite in identity and access management. And I think that is in recognition of the, of two things.

One is, it is a strategically important business decision and business capability that people need. But also if anything, we're seeing an acceleration towards digital channels.

I mean, you know, I know people like my, my mom for example, has never, ever done online, online, shopping before in her life. But now she's forced to, she's never gonna go back.

You know, it's, it's such a convenient way for her to get stuff done. Now that she's discovered it, it won't go back. So there is an acceleration, I think, of the use of digital channels and people are waking up to the value that that brings to their lives.

So it's, it's interesting times, I think in that sense And I like fully agree, and I look at our advice for customers. I think there are two things to one is identity and security. Don't the challenges don't go away. So you need to address these, but there's a, a clear shift towards saying, we want to make step by step and, and us be, be very fast with some results in special specifically the areas of customer of IOT identity in all these areas, which are outward facing, which are directly related to the, the true transformation.

This is, I would say fully in accordance with what you're saying. Yes, I, I would, I would agree with that. I think one of the challenges that, that kind of the modern digital experience is bringing is this concept of relationship management. It's because we now operate in a multidimensional digital world, thinking about who is doing what and how they are, how those people are related to each other.

The example I gave of, you know, watching Netflix on TV, lots of different people in a relationship in a household or in, in a business, for example, where you have different roles, different reporting lines, how do you manage all of that in the context of which devices are being used, for which applications that the complexity around identity relationship management is increasing exponentially. And the more and more things that we have connected that are either we are engaging with, or we are asking to engage on our behalf actually, where you have things acting as a proxy for who you are.

It, it creates some really complex challenges. If you don't, if you don't pay attention to making sure that those complex challenges are addressed properly, then you create chaos and you create very dysfunctional customer journeys.

And, and it's, you know, it's, it's a really, really important area to get, right? Yes. And it is exactly the point. We can't do it separately per app, per digital service. We need to do it in a consistent way, which means we need to have this backend service, which provides the identity services. I think there's no way to avoid it. Maybe before we end up our, our conversation, maybe one, one question on another area. So when we look at identity management and one of the big utter hype topics, which is AI, so the artificial intelligence, or what is called AI.

So what is called AI, which isn't really, but anyway, we see this, this momentum towards machine learning towards AI. So what are you guys doing here? So what is your, your approach on that? So we're, I mean, we are investing significantly in AI, actually in, in two broad areas. The first is in the context of zero trust and Carter, where you have to make informed contextual decisions in real time. That that's a massive challenge.

It's a, it's a challenge of technical scalability, as well as just, you know, the wealth of information that you could take into account when making a decision for authorization or, or authentication of access doing that at scale in real time is an ideal application of AI. And so that's one of the things that we're investing R and D into, and that we're actually gonna be launching some tools around that very soon. So applying artificial intelligence into large amounts of contextual data in order to streamline the process of making real time decisions is, is the first area.

And then the second area is in, is around governance. So in a large organization with tens of thousands of employees with multiple applications, that those people access, then the combination of, of permissions grows exponentially.

And you, it's not unusual to have a situation where you are managing literally millions of different permissions across an organization. And as that organization changes people come on board, people leave people change jobs. There's a regulatory requirement to make sure that permissions are up to date and people don't have access inappropriately to systems with toxic combinations.

For example, again, because of the sheer complexity and volume of data that's required to analyze for that, it it's generally one as a manual process and people just sort of box tick to say, yes, access continue applying artificial intelligence to that challenge is also an incredibly valuable tool because it allows you to automate with confidence, which takes a lot of cost out of your business and at the same time improves security.

So, so those are really the two areas that for drop is focuses on right now as a way of intelligently using machine learning in order to drive business improvement, both in terms of cost, but also security and user experience. Okay. Great answer. Thank you very much, Tim, for all these insights and your perspectives on the identity fabric and the future of identity management, I think was that at this time to hand over back over to behold, who then is the only one between the attendees and the coffee break. It's been a pleasure Martin. Thank you for your time. Thank you.