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.
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.
Vendor introduction report covering oort.io - an emerging vendor in the Identity Threat Detection and Response sector.
An independent vendor assessment of Scaled Access, covering Company Key Facts, Funding, Case Studies, Technology Key Facts, Technology Review and Strengths Analysis.