Simplifying IAM with Orchestration – IBM Blog

A recent example proved what many in the industry already knew. This means that identity has become a major attack vector. The 2024 report shows a 71% year-on-year increase in valid identities used in cyberattacks. What really puts this into perspective is realizing that just as much as organizations witness phishing attacks, valid identities are just as likely to be used in cyberattacks. Hackers don’t hack. They log in.

The risk of malicious actors using valid identities as an entry point is expected to continue as more applications and systems are added to today’s hybrid environments. We’ve found that the overwhelming majority of organizations are choosing to use a variety of identity providers that offer the best features for each use case, rather than consolidating with one vendor. Using a variety of identity tools increases the complexity of managing access to legacy application infrastructure and integrating new users during mergers and acquisitions. Hybrid reality has also resulted in inconsistent user experiences for employees, partners, and customers, increased risk of identity-based attacks, and placed additional burden on administrators.

To address the identity challenges presented by today’s hybrid environments, enterprises need a versatile solution that complements their existing identity solutions while effectively integrating various identity and access management (IAM) silos into a cohesive whole. Solutions that help you create a consistent user experience for your employees, partners, and customers across all your applications and systems. Organizations and industry analysts refer to this connected IAM infrastructure as an identity fabric. Organizations are starting to move toward connecting multiple IAM solutions through a common identity fabric.

Security in your digital journey

To protect the integrity of the digital user journey, organizations use a variety of tools that encompass adjacent functions such as bot mitigation, identity verification and verification, user authentication, authorization, fraud detection, risk analytics, and access management. Building and maintaining these integrations is complex and involves operational overhead associated with time and resources. These different tools are not easily interconnected and do not produce standardized types of signals. As a result, the interpretation of different red flags is siled across different events along the digital user journey. The lack of an integrated approach to risk management along the digital user journey hinders the adoption of continuous adaptive trust principles and adds undue risk to the system. A variety of disjointed identity tools prevents you from creating consistent user experiences and security controls. Orchestration solutions improve the effectiveness and efficiency of risk management along the digital user journey.

identity adjustment

Identity and access management projects are complex, taking 12 to 18 months. Solving today’s identity challenges, including unifying IAM silos and modernizing access to legacy applications, requires skilled staff. Many of the solutions on the market are not helpful and actually lead to more vendor lock-in. What is really needed is an open, integrated ecosystem that allows for flexibility and simple, less technical integration. This is where identity structure and identity coordination come into play. Orchestration is a critical component and unifying glue for the identity fabric. Without it, building an identity fabric would be resource-intensive and expensive. Orchestration enables more intelligent decisions, simplifies everything from onboarding to offboarding, and establishes consistent security policies. Identity Orchestration takes the burden off administrators by automating large-scale processes quickly and easily. This helps you improve your identity risk posture and avoid vendor lock-in while providing a consistent and seamless user experience.

Benefits of Identity Orchestration

Consistent and seamless user experience design

Identity Orchestration helps you streamline a consistent, seamless experience for your employees, partners, and customers across the entire identity lifecycle. From account creation to login, passwordless authentication with secret keys, and account management, you can easily orchestrate your identity journey across your identity stack to create a seamless experience. IBM’s Identity Orchestration Flow Designer allows you to build a consistent and secure authentication journey for your users, regardless of application. These journeys can be easily built through low-code, no-code orchestration engines to simplify management burden.

Fraud and Risk Prevention

Orchestration allows you to combine fraud signals, decisions, and mitigation controls, such as different types of authenticators and identity verification technologies. You can clearly define how to grant access to trusted individuals and how to mitigate untrusted users through secure authentication. This approach overlays risk and fraud context consistently and continuously throughout the identity journey. IBM Security® Assurance Orchestration helps you detect threats by integrating fraud and red flags. It also provides native, modern, and robust anti-phishing risk-based authentication to all applications, including legacy apps, through drag-and-drop workflows.

Avoid vendor lock-in with identity-agnostic modernization

Organizations have invested in many existing tools and assets across their IAM stack. This can range from existing directories to legacy applications to existing fraud signals. IBM Security Validated Identity Orchestration allows organizations to take their existing tools and apply consistent, continuous, and contextual orchestration to all of their identity journeys. This makes it easy to integrate and unify your directories, modernize legacy applications, and simplify third-party integrations for multi-factor authentication (MFA). , hazard and notification system

Take advantage of IBM Security Verification

IBM Security verify simplifies IAM through orchestration to reduce complexity, improve identity risk posture, and make it easy to integrate multiple identity system providers (IdPs) across hybrid environments through a low-code or no-code environment, ensuring user security. Simplify your journey.

IBM provides identity-agnostic modernization tools that complement your existing identity tools and help you manage, migrate, and enforce consistent identity security from one IAM solution to another. Integrating user journeys and policies ensures security consistency across all systems and applications, creating a seamless user experience and security controls across your entire identity environment.

Learn about IBM Security Valid today.