Today I'm proud to announce the launch of The Cyber Hut's IAM Radar: a subscription based curated vendor intelligence report. Released monthly, the report tracks the top 6 vendors in the global identity and access management space, providing insight, impartial comment and analysis to empower those within industry, consultancy, vendor and investment communities.
I wanted to wrap up 2022, with an anecdotal look at some of the key facts and figures that made up the bulk of The Cyber Hut's interactions, research and community engagement over the past year.
It has been a great year professionally and personally, yet parts of the world are still being ravaged by the pandemic, conflict, economic turmoil and the cost of living crisis. Hopefully 2023 can start to stabilise some of those broader problems we will undoubtedly all feel in the coming months.
I want to take a retrospective look back at 2022 in numbers, adding in a few stories and comments as I go. I hope you enjoy it and thank you to all of the global identity and access management community who have engaged with The Cyber Hut over the past 12 months.
Two weeks ago we ran another of our LinkedIn polls, querying the cyber, identity and access management community around a perennial question the industry has yet to consistently provide an answer for - in both user behaviour and technical solutions - "would you pay for privacy?".
Zero Trust has been with us for the best part of a decade - since the likes of the Jericho Forum, Google's Beyond Corp and ex-Forrester analyst John Kindervag have all promoted a view of moving the concept of "trust" from a location to a concept based on the identity, device and associated context.
Version 2.0 of the US Department of Defence Zero Trust Reference Architecture has been cleared for public release and is a good, detailed read regarding an actual migration and implementation model. The document is available here.
An introduction to just in time, next generation authorization vendor sgnl.ai
Homegrown access control is limiting business agility - the ability to share data with those who need it, engage in joint ventures and B2B partnerships, protect PII and open up APIs to employees and customers alike. As such the market for authorization has increased substantially in the last 36 months. Funding rounds for the likes of Styra, PlainID and SGNL to name but a few indicate increased venture expectation that access control has a long tale of growth.
Over a 4 week period I asked the preferred deployment model option for four key identity and access management services: consumer identity, workforce access management, identity governance and administration and privileged access management.
The results where subtle and nuanced.
This week saw the FIDO Authenticate conference take place in Seatle. I attended via the virtual remote route, going through the vast majority of the sessions from the comfort of the office. A few items that stood out for me.
Passwordless authentication is often described as improving both the usability and security aspects of both the employee and customer identity journeys. Many approaches to passwordless have emerged over the last 5 years - including hardware, software, biometric and standards based initiatives.
In November 2021, The Cyber Hut released a 61 page buyer guide for passwordless authentication, describing the vendor capabilities, requirements, integration options, B2E and B2C use cases and planning recommendations for migration.
A brief snapshot of questions to consider, when engaging software based solution providers in this space is described here.
Let us start with the basics. IDQL stands for Identity Query Language. The description given to it from the Hexa website (I'll come back to Hexa in a minute) is "Identity Query Language (IDQL) is a declarative access policy and set of APIs that enables the mapping of a centrally managed policy into the native format of multiple clouds and application platforms". The main initiator of the IDQL project is Strata who issued a press release back in May 2022 outlining the concept and idea. Strata is the "identity orchestration" company, that looks to solve the growing problem where identity and permissions data is being spread across a multi-cloud landscape - but somehow needs to be managed centrally in order to improve visibility and security.