Last week I had the privilege of attending a consumer identity and access management day hosted by specialist CIAM consultancy IdentIT to deliver a key note presentation on the future trends of consumer IAM. Identity specialists, security leaders and enterprise architects gathered at the Circuit Zolder in Belgium for an afternoon of identity discussions, case studies and more importantly track racing on a former F1 circuit!
Styra, the team behind "Cloud Native Authorization" recently announced a few feature called "Styra Run". Their launch blog back in July described Run as being "a new holistic approach" to authorization. But that is trying to solve? Styra are behind the popular Open Policy Agent - a policy driven decision engine for authorization in cloud native environments. Whilst likely OPA is focused on the protection of infrastructure (think containerized ecosytems) it is also used for protecting APIs and custom applications. The developer-first angle sees a dedicated rule language and the storage of policy data in files. The OPA project on github has over 7000 stars.
In the last 3 years or so, we have seen huge interest in the need to improve authentication techniques, that deliver a passwordless MFA experience. What is stopping adoption?
Security starts when authentication ends. It's a line I have used a few times over the years as it is one I actually quite believe in. In an era where firewalls are derided as being pretty toothless in the fight against omnipresent complex cyber attacks - and the concept of trusted networks quite rightly become obsolete in the world of "zero trust" - it always seemed odd to me, to put such a large emphasis on stringent authentication services. Clearly authentication is hugely important don't misunderstand, but my point really was that authentication (even with a strong MFA component) becomes less relevant if a) it is not continuous and b) not part of a more holistic approach focused on the access control of services, data and APIs.

Join our founder Simon Moffatt on September 15th where he will join PlainID on a discussion around external authorization platforms.

The modern digital native enterprise is facing a number of emerging and incumbent challenges - from increased competition and demand for a more agile service deployment model through to needing the ability to share more data to more people, all under a competing climate of increased security threats coupled with a lower risk appetite.

Trust within the identity world is a huge priority. Trust regarding the on-boarding and registration of external users via proofing (think assurance levels using identity validation and verification techniques) right through to creating trust labels for employees in order to monitor for malicious activity - that is either driven by external threat actors, insider threat or just unintentional bad user behaviour.

Join our founder Simon Moffatt along with Michael Rothschild VP of Product Marketing at HYPR on August 22nd, where they'll be taking a look at authentication within the global financial services industry.

In this industry fireside chat webinar, Simon and Michael will take a look a the current challenges and opportunities that exist within the financial services industry as it pertains to authentication.

When on briefings and inquiry workshops there are often emerging themes that start to spring up repeatedly. Perhaps every few months, perhaps under different projects, using different terms and stories and perhaps from unexpected people or teams.

There has been one theme over the past 12 months or so that is difficult to ignore: not only how identity based security has left-shifted into the thinking of information leaders to being a first-class citizen in the technology arsenal, but how identity is moving into a new territory. The territory of autonomy.

Join our Founder and Analyst Simon Moffatt on July 20th for our latest industry fireside chat, where he will be discussing the emerging area of SIM based authentication, with Paul McGuire, CEO of tru.id.

A long read post investigating the evolution of decoupled authorization platforms – including use case and capability analysis and brief vendor review including Axiomatics, PlainID, Styra and Scaled Access.

This post is only available to members.