Commissioned by Strata Identity
Published August 2023
Executive Summary
Change is inevitable, as the saying goes. And, nowhere are the effects of rapid change more apparent than in today’s multi-cloud computing environments.
Organizations are constantly adopting new tools and technologies, including multiple cloud platforms, to stay competitive, agile, and secure. The findings of this year’s State of Multi-Cloud Identity Report build on the reports from 2021 and 2022 to show how organizations are thinking about identity services and technologies is shifting in response to external and internal forces.
What hasn’t wavered in the past three years is the increasing prevalence of multi- cloud in the enterprise and the resulting identity fragmentation that leads to security and operational risk.
Identity is a fundamental component of enterprise security. It relies on uniquely differentiating one user from another, granting the correct level of access for policies for each employee, customer, and partner. Getting identity and access policies wrong can result in the costly loss of customer confidence, data breaches, and regulatory compliance issues.
However, getting identity and access policies right is not easy. Many organizations face challenges in driving identity modernization — often tied to attempts to hire unicorn identity professionals who can handle the complexity and diversity of multiple identity platforms and services. But finding such talent is difficult, if not impossible. The skills or talent gap has delayed identity modernization projects, undermined internal capabilities, and driven away customers and revenue.
The solution to these challenges lies in the orchestration of an identity fabric. By harmonizing identity and access policies, Identity Orchestration enables organizations to manage multiple identity providers to dynamically secure applications across multiple cloud platforms and integrate new identity services seamlessly.
The benefits of an orchestrated identity fabric are manifold. It facilitates organizational digital transformations, and the modernization of on-premises applications with modern authentication capabilities while ensuring the decommissioning of legacy identity infrastructure does not compromise critical business processes or undermine security.