The 68th Edition of the Identity Jedi Newsletter

WHAT’S HAPPENING THIS WEEK

AI and Identity

Obviously the darling of the tech world last year was AI. LLMs, Generative AI, ChatGPT, OpenAI, all terms that were popular last year. You couldn’t read anything online without one of these words coming up. For identity, it’s a bit of a resurgence. We’ve been down this path before circa 2015, when identity companies thought AI meant advanced statistics and access recommendations. Which at their premise weren’t bad use cases, however the execution was lacking, and the intent was not there.

Fast forward to today, and identity is being pushed to the forefront of security and is being rethought through the lens of AI. With advancements in machine learning and natural language processing, every aspect of identity has the potential to be enhanced. Identity verification processes are becoming more accurate and secure. This also allows for a better user experience, with fewer false positives and less friction during onboarding processes. Authentication methods, such as biometrics and behavioral analytics, are also being improved with AI. This not only increases security but also provides a seamless user experience.

But it's not just about authentication and verification. AI is also revolutionizing identity access management (IAM). With the ability to analyze patterns and behaviors, IAM systems can now make informed decisions about granting or denying access to certain resources. This reduces the risk of unauthorized access and helps prevent data breaches. Potentially, and at least that’s the claims vendors are making. Now comes the hard part…proving it.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s the right way to go, and given the number of acquisitions we saw last year, we should start to see these things come to fruition this year. It’s the push that identity has needed for a long time.

Delinea buys Authomize

2024 kicks off with the same pattern we saw in 2023. Say it with me:

Consolidation, Consolidation, Consolidation.

It's an interesting purchase from Delinea as they snap up ITDR player Authomize. I’m keen to see how this plays from an alliance perspective. Not just the Authomize acquisition but how all the acquisitions from 2023 ( and 2024) will affect partnerships between the identity companies. Will they continue to play nice as each vendor becomes competitive with their partners? History says they won’t.

I expect this year to be the first glimpse of these converged platforms. We saw the marketing hype late last year; we were told beta versions were coming early this year; I’ll be fascinated to see the live versions.

I expect this to be the year for consolidated platforms to start showing their value. Most likely in the second half, as most of these companies will have spent most of last year figuring out what they purchased, defining a strategy, and then pitching the value to their early adopters.

Let’s pay close attention to these vendors' stories as conference season ramps up. What value do they see, and more importantly, what value do their customers see?

Rethinking Identity

To date, identity has been heavily administration and IT-focused. Fix the time and scale problem. You have unknown widgets, so let me create something for you that allows you to count the widgets. For every widget you count, we can assign a dollar value, etc, etc.

The problem of understanding what users had access to was so wide-reaching that we lost focus on one of the very reasons we needed to understand it in the first place.

So we can prevent misuse.

Instead, we got focused on admin problems because that’s what we could sell, and that’s what we could easily explain. But now, with the emergence of new technologies and the increasing importance of digital identity in our everyday lives, it’s time to rethink how we approach identity.

“If I knew then what I know now”. How many times have we said this to ourselves about something? Well, in this case, we know a lot about how to implement IAM systems and how identity can help secure environments, so it’s time to start applying that knowledge. Let’s move the IT administration problem. This isn’t about how many accounts we can create, or tickets we can close. It’s about how do we make sure the right user accesses the right application with the right amount of privilege. It ensures that when it’s the wrong user, the amount of things that the user can access is limited.

Let’s solve the hard problems. Because that is where the value is to an organization, and that is where we can tell the stories that sell.

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