Traditional on-prem identity governance tools have created fragile, overgrown tech stacks that can no longer keep up with today’s complex, cloud-first enterprises.
Every point fix and bolt-on around legacy IGA increases access risk, expands the attack surface, and makes effective identity security harder instead of easier.
A converged, cloud-native identity security platform provides a solid foundation to reduce risk, simplify compliance, and secure human and non-human identities across hybrid environments.
Many use the old “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” adage to delay purchasing something new if their existing version still works. A pair of shoes (fashion notwithstanding). Major appliances. Even processes and ways of working in an organization. The problem with the adage is when it’s used to avoid taking on something that needs to be improved, but may be difficult to achieve.
Identity security is one of those situations. When the first identity governance platforms showed up in the market, they were revolutionary. Finally, organizations could track a person with their entitlements and access to key enterprise resources.
These first systems were expensive and cumbersome, requiring companies to build and operate their own data centers and servers—not to mention hiring personnel to deploy, maintain and tailor
the system to their unique infrastructure. But the systems solved a critical need. They took a process that sometimes wasn’t even being done and gave enterprises the tools and insight they needed to
keep most identities’ access in check. (For critical applications, at least.)
And that situation was fine…for a while. And only as long as the only way into an organization’s network was within their physical location. But, as is the nature of business, things changed.
One step forward, two steps back
Today’s enterprises are more complex than ever. Public, private and hybrid clouds. Hundreds or even thousands of applications strewn across multiple environments and varying infrastructures.
Identities outside the organization, from both a physical and administrative perspective. Now, non-human identities (e.g., robots, machines, devices) outnumber the human ones. The identity
governance platforms we started with couldn’t hope to keep up with the pace of business. In short, the old way of doing identity governance was broken.
Rather than rip the systems they had spent years building, it felt easier to try to fix the situation by tacking on new capabilities with new tools. But what organizations were building
was a complicated tech stack with a bevy of helpfully-acronymed “solutions,” each only able to address one particular part of a much larger problem. Some were linked together with tenuous
integrations written by in-house developers. Others operated entirely on their own. Sharing data among them all required yet another piece of software (or worse, manual transfers).
In an ironic twist of fate, the problem organizations were trying to solve—proper management and governance of identities’ access to enterprise resources—was made worse every time a new piece of software was added. With every deployment, new holes in the perimeter opened, with new tools following suit to patch them until enterprises were left with a wooden block tower one table shake away from crashing down.