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I AM Scale and the Identified Web

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So this week sees me on the road in sunny Munich at the Kuppinger Cole European Identity & Cloud 2013. Lots of friends (both old and new) contributing on some interesting tracks and panels.

Since casting Gartner’s Nexus of forces as ‘the four horsemen’ I’ve been noticing how often these transformative trends are divorced from one another in both presention and analysis. in the real world many of the use cases we see in the enterprise today are influenced by novel combinations of these drivers. Over the next few weeks I’ll take on a few of these “compound trends” and look at how they influence the IAM and IDM landscape. To begin, picking up a theme close to our hearts at my day job, I’ll look at the explosion in enterprise to consumer-facing identity projects and the (I would argue) contributory shift from an anonymized to an identified web.

Until recent times, even for the informed enterprise, though the web had long been seen as a rich source of data and information, that value was typically measured in statistics terms. Enterprises analyzed the behavior and characteristics of an inherently anonymous, faceless audience – The Market. Many saw external Identity as relevant only within applications and post user-signup. Segmentation, representative samples and confidence intervals were the order of the day when looking beyond the enterprise’s existing HR & CRM identity recordsets.

Over the last few years however, three of our horsemen: Cloud, Mobile and Social have forever revolutionized the way the Enterprise perceives external identities. Now ubiquitous Mobile devices drive the frequency and quality of time critical customer interactions through the roof. The Social web removes barriers to engagement whilst simultaneously demonstrating that consumers of all types are quite prepared to trade privacy for convenience, thus supplementing the wealth of transactional data with context, history and peripheral personal detail. Add to this mix the virtual eradication of traditional boundaries, both in terms of Cloud infrastructure and simply in the scope and size of the audience and we have ourselves a true paradigm shift. The clumsy approximations of the noughties have been replaced by revenue driven business opportunities to engage directly, not just with existing but with potential customers, identifying with surgical precision the high value assets and targeting these with ever more personally tailored messaging.

In which axis is this most visibly and painfully apparent for the CIO, CISO and their Identity technology teams? That of absolute user/identity scale.

The impact of this combination: managing ever more Identity data coupled with ever higher expectations for the quality, granularity and personality of such data, really sorts the men from the boys where Identity technology platforms are concerned. Enter horseman number 4, this is beginning to resemble an Information management problem to boot.

The problem is that, in the late ’90s, when the Identity stacks most enterprises are using today were being architected, the scale challenges visible at even today’s mid-sized enterprises, were simply not commonly envisaged. Is it any wonder that trying to squeeze millions or tens of millions of external identities into a solution designed for a few thousand employees, and then stretching that solution far beyond the network boundaries within which it was designed to function, results in some ominously creaking identity infrastructure?

So, perhaps what the enterprise needs is a proven, feature complete Identity stack, presciently architected before anyone had thought of Social, Mobile, BigData or hacked a Cloud) … mmm

In fact many of the absolute scale and performance challenges faced by the modern Enterprise CIO were around, even in the ’90s, the problem is they were being experienced and addressed only behind the (then more robust) firewalls of the likes of Verizon, AT&T and Vodafone. It was then called the “Telco Scale” challenge – today we call it just “Internet Scale”. If you wonder what the guys who built products to solve those challenges are up to now … Guess what … they started a band ;-)

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