Commissioned by Strata Identity
Published May 2022
Executive Summary
Enterprises have accelerated their move to multiple cloud platforms over the past 12 months and intend to keep pushing in this direction. An increasing share of app workloads are hosted across multiple cloud platforms, but with only a minority of enterprises planning on giving up on-premises approaches entirely, most enterprises face the combination of hybrid and multi-cloud in perpetuity.
Successfully achieving the promise of a combined hybrid and multi-cloud future can only be gained if enterprises address their technical debt and outdated IAM (identity and access management) practices. Distributed identities across scattered identity silos result in inconsistent identity and access policies when people are accessing apps. Poor visibility of existing access policies means enterprises are flying blind—they do not know where apps are hosted, nor who has access to their data.
Current identity standards and technologies for multi-cloud policy management are failing to live up to the actual demands of multi-cloud, and enterprises are having to hire expensive identity architects to fill the gap. Nevertheless, data breaches continue, the identity threat looms large, and more strategic identity and IT modernization initiatives remain unaddressed.
Modernizing identity and access management is a strategic imperative for enterprises with hybrid and multi-cloud strategies. Consistent policies irrespective of where app workloads are deployed are essential; relying on identity architects to manually stitch these together is not a sustainable approach. A new category of software—Identity Orchestration—offers a better solution: a distributed abstraction layer that integrates multi-cloud and hybrid identity infrastructures and allows fine-grained enforcement of consistent identity and access policies. Identity Orchestration supports security modernization through Zero Trust approaches, and also gives enterprises the ability to achieve consistent Policy Orchestration between cloud platforms and across the tech stack.
