How Emerging Tech Will Change Our Online Identities

As a technology innovation leader in the Illinois Department of Commerce, Jennifer M. O’Rourke struggled with the sheer volume and complexity of identity and access management, or IAM.

“As we looked to provide a particular organization with a tax credit, there were audit points that included other organizations, but we kept those resources in isolated, segmented, disparate systems,” said O’Rourke, now co-founder and president of identity technology firm Attest. “There was no efficient, portfolio-level way in which a given individual or organization could engage with the department.”

Across government, technology leaders and business-line managers rank IAM as a foremost concern: In 2018 the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) included identity on its top 10 list of state tech priorities for the first time. A number of factors have come together to make IAM a pressing issue:

Biometrics and multifactor authentication have helped validate user identities, but these tend to be tech-heavy solutions and they aren’t always user-friendly. IT leaders are looking toward the next iteration.

When Jennifer O’Rourke was innovation leader at the Illinois Department of Commerce, she encountered the complex problem of identity management. Now as co-founder and president of Attest, she and her team are using blockchain to consolidate and track citizen IDs.

The vendor community is eager to assist: Grand View Research sees the IAM market reaching $22.68 billion by 2025. Before the spending starts, it’s worth looking at some of the main tools currently emerging on the IAM landscape, including cloud-based controls, artificial intelligence and blockchain.

The rise of cloud computing creates new challenges around IAM, but also offers new solutions.

Move to the cloud and IAM leaves the familiar (if clunky) confines of your legacy environment. You may work with multiple cloud providers, each with its own unique security controls. This creates the potential for confusion and complication. But cloud also brings its own remedies.

Cloud providers and third parties may offer identity as a service, or identity as a platform. “These tools create a central identity database that integrates with your internal directory. Through that they manage a single sign-on and multi-factor authentication, and they can identity life cycle management,” said Henry Bagdasarian, executive director of the Identity Management Institute.

Google, for instance, boasts that its Cloud Identity tool “makes it easy to provision and manage users and groups, set up single sign-on, and configure multi-factor authentication” directly from a central console. All the major cloud providers claim similar capabilities. Some will also offer identity governance services, helping to create policies for identity management, while others may deliver authentication services in support of multi-factor authentication.

Centralization is the key asset here. By leveraging the cloud to create a central directory, IT leaders can gain a global view of IAM, integrating their legacy and cloud iterations in a common touchpoint. “You want to centralize and automate as much as possible. You don’t want your system admin to have to go one by one removing and adding people,” Bagdasarian said.

In the big picture, IAM seeks to manage identity, ensuring that those who interact with government systems are who they claim to be. In a more granular sense, though, IAM puts the emphasis on access — it’s about limiting who gets in, and where.

Some experts point to rising capabilities around machine learning and artificial intelligence as a potential boon to access management. AI can see into the inner workings of a system with a speed and volume unmatched by human senses.