Considerations for a Modern IAM Infrastructure

It seems that every blog post begins by mentioning the pandemic. But, there's no need —  no one can deny that the last one and a half years have shown how global disruptions can act as a catalyst for business change. But other factors have influenced that change too: industry regulation, business growth, company consolidations, more intricate cybersecurity attacks, and new technological advancements aimed to prevent the latter.

All these undercurrents challenge existing identity and access management (IAM) infrastructures. The modern IAM system goes beyond managing the I and A but helps deliver a competitive advantage, increase productivity and ensure that the organization is compliant with regulations.

Failure to modernize IAM leads to higher security risks and poor user experience. It also brings added time and costs to maintenance, customizations, and compliance. Therefore, it is essential to achieve an infrastructure that will become an enabler for future growth.

Three important factors to consider when choosing a way to modernize your infrastructure include: 

• Speed and scalability

• Integration

• Deployment options.

Let's look at these in more detail:

Speed and Scalability 

Speed and scalability are essential to delivering modern identity management. The faster your organization can manage the existing infrastructure, react to alerts, and adapt to the emerging changes, the more competitive and successful you will become. Another important factor is scalability, as being able to customize and configure your IAM rather than writing code outside of the platform, means you can solve a broader range of use cases and scale this out across the organization.

A highly capable identity system handles the most intricate use-cases and scenarios. It enables you to centralize identity management, provide common APIs, and share security policies. It results in faster and easier delivery of new apps and services to your users.

Integration

A modern Identity Management System needs to have complete architectural coverage of the use-cases that arise when building large-scale mobile, web, and API-driven applications for external and internal use.

With the exponential growth of API use, protecting them has become an especially important challenge. Legacy IAMs cannot solve the task of managing access to many microservices. Therefore, businesses need a modern solution.

Many identity and API management systems on the market were originally conceived one or two decades ago, intended to be used in XML and SOA-oriented environments. Even if they later added OAuth capabilities, these are seldom enough to provide the required flexibility for digital organizations to integrate with a large number of API- and cloud-based services. A modern IAM system shouldn't hold back app developers trying to build user-friendly apps based upon the latest tools and frameworks for native and single-page applications.

Deployment to Suit Business Needs

The third factor to consider when modernizing your IAM infrastructure is deployment.

For a tighter control of resiliency, better protection of data, and time savings, on-premise may be preferable (or is simply a must-have). On the other hand, deploying your IAM infrastructure in a cloud environment can be quick and, in some instances, more cost-effective. A public cloud enables the ability to dynamically add and remove computing and networking resources and provides easy access to additional services.

Regardless of which path you decide upon, you should have full control over the data of your users, employees, customers, and partners. Luckily, gone are the days when a SaaS-based approach of storing your data and identities in a provider-chosen place was the only option for a straightforward deployment. It is now more than possible to retain complete control over your most valuable assets while still being able to easily set up, manage and dynamically scale your identity platform.

Final Thoughts

It's important to consider these three factors and prioritize your business goals and vision when architecting a modern IAM infrastructure. Doing so will allow you to reduce maintenance costs, improve the quality and availability of your services, and speed up time-to-market.

Many large companies with a long history now face the challenge of modernizing infrastructure to meet digital transformation requirements. To stay competitive, these organizations must increase the efficiency and flexibility of their services and systems.

Here at Curity, we help customers achieve a modern infrastructure future-proofed for changes to come, allowing you to:

• Configure rather than write code, even for the more complex use-cases

• Achieve consistency by following open standards for integration, such as OAuth and OpenID Connect, making them easier and faster to use, customize and deploy

• More easily map requirements onto functions by applying separation of concerns design principles 

• Deploy cloud-native on your terms, regardless of being on-premise, one-cloud, or multi-cloud

• Comply with regulations, such as PSD2, GDPR, FAPI, Open Banking, and others.

Learn more about how Curity can help modernize infrastructure here.