Hosted across four days in Austin, Texas, the conference featured a welcome reception May 23, a Summit Session by Industry Experts and a Networking Event on May 24, an Unsummit Interactive Technical Session on May 25, and an optional partner day on May 26.
As a key ForgeRock Partner, Indigo consulting was excited to attend. So, what were the key takeaways from this year’s event?
Read on to see the key talking points and insights we learned from IDLive 2022.
IAM & COVID-19 Take Center Stage
Much of this year’s conversation focused on the impact of the pandemic and the rapid digital transformation it forced upon many businesses.
It’s clear the workplace has changed, and continues to do so. Distributed work has become a permanent fixture, as has cloud computing. And while this has created new opportunities for many companies, it also introduced new challenges.
While software as a service (SaaS) platforms and remote work enable greater flexibility, improved productivity, and new revenue streams, they also pose a significant risk to the enterprise. This risk is only further exacerbated by the growing complexity of the digital supply chain as businesses around the world continue to add new vendors and suppliers to their stable.
Renewed Interest in Zero Trust
We already know the past several years have seen more data breaches and more severe data breaches than at any other point in recent memory.
In response to these threats, we’ve seen deep interest in the concept of zero trust — the idea that security and resilience in a post-COVID world require businesses to trust nothing and authenticate everything. It’s a solid solution to the vulnerabilities of both the cyber supply chain and distributed work — yet not without its own challenges.
The most significant of these, and the question that’s driving the second wave of evolution for zero trust is how one enables a user to be trusted within an ecosystem. Process and policy aside, this requires a specialized platform that combines authentication and authorization with artificial intelligence, machine learning, or some other form of pattern recognition. And it was during this discussion that ForgeRock gave attendees the first of several exciting announcements.
Autonomous Access
The company’s IAM portfolio, already designed with simplicity and observability in mind, has a new addition.
Autonomous Access is a product that leverages and extends existing authentication tree architecture as a means of better threat detection and mitigation. With a heavy focus on AI and ML, the autonomous access solutions aligns well with ForgeRock’s Auto ID platform, which analyzes access from multiple data sources to provide more intelligent role mining, lifecycle management, definition, and assignment.
This functionality has the potential to be extended to other aspects of authentication and authorization, even further streamlining the IAM process. It’s an incredibly forward-thinking product release, and we’ll happily admit that we’re excited to see what comes of it. And it’s also exactly what we’ve come to expect of ForgeRock — the constant push to make IAM simpler yet sophisticated, smarter without limiting functionality.
The Future of Identity and Access Management
Another major highlight of the conference was a presentation hosted by Eve Maler, ForgeRock’s Chief Technology Officer. Maler discussed how the decentralization of identity is the inevitable future of IAM. We’re already seeing technology and innovations moving in that direction, such as digital wallets for credential stores.
Yet these are only the beginning.
If there’s one insight we can take away from Web 2.0, it’s that our privacy is compromised. Businesses collect our data, analyze our usage patterns, and correlate their analysis with those close to us. Privacy has been rendered obsolete, and people have become products.
Web 3.0’s Promise of Better Privacy
Web 3.0 in many ways represents the rebirth of online privacy. It’s all about the ability to own your data, and a new concept known as Zero Knowledge. Under zero knowledge, only necessary information is shared because authentication is carried out via the answer to a single question in a trusted conversation.
It was clear from Maler’s presentation that she — and ForgeRock by association — are both forward-thinking and passionate about security and privacy. It drove home the fact that ForgeRock is exactly the kind of innovative partner with which we love to work. We want vendors that get it — who see the future, understand the present, and can help our clients bring in forward-thinking, scalable security solutions.
The Shift to Passwordless
The password is dead, long live the password.
It’s a rallying cry that IAM advocates have been using for decades. But judging from this year’s IDLive, we might finally see it come to pass. Passwordless authentication is a huge issue, and an important driver for ForgeRock, which is constantly exploring ways to help people login without traditional credentials.
The most important factor is that passwordless authentication, particularly when it comes to payment and transaction management, is completely frictionless. It needs to seamlessly strike a balance of risk, compliance, authentication, and authorization. For ForgeRock, this goes hand-in-hand with workforce enablement, customer identity, and securing the cloud.
Personalization Meets IAM
Personalization is another major driver in the IAM space, and another key consideration for ForgeRock. Businesses need a means of identifying, recommending, and streamlining high friction points in the customer journey without compromising privacy.
The first step in this is to move away from cookies — from there, the way forward ties in directly with Maler’s presentation, allowing customers to say what they want to share and how they want to share it in order to further improve the customer experience.
Closing Thoughts
IDLive 2022 was an incredible experience for Indigo Consulting. It taught us a great deal more about the IAM space and how it’s currently evolving. But more importantly, it drove home ForgeRock’s value to us as a partner and vendor.
ForgeRock is a brand dedicated to streamlining IAM, making it more simple, observable, and debuggable. Backed by strong service-level agreements, it provides an IAM solution that’s both intuitive and easy to monitor. In short, it’s exactly the kind of thing we seek to offer our clients, no matter where they are in their cloud journey.
