Identity Orchestration

What is Identity Orchestration?

Organisations can swiftly create seamless and secure user journeys with identity orchestration, often known as “orchestration.” The identity and access management (IAM) system evaluates whether to provide you access and to which resources each time you connect to a website, which starts a complicated chain of operations. It ascertains whether your login information is accurate and whether you are utilising a recognised device. It searches for any irregularities, including an unexpected location or repeated login attempts. The possibilities are almost limitless, and each one can lead you on a new “journey” in search of the data you need.

Identity orchestration is responsible for identifying these trips. Your experience is orchestrated by the website administrator using building blocks based on IT and security regulations. Passwordless authentication may be used if you log in at the usual time and place using a known device, but if you use a new device or connect via airport Wi-Fi, you may be required to provide additional identification, a process known as “step-up” authentication. The login attempt will be banned or forwarded for investigation and correction if, on the other hand, it originates from a suspect IP address or location (Russia? China?). The basis for any of these decisions would be how the administrator orchestrated the systems.

Using Identity Orchestration platform for Multi-Cloud Success

A distributed identity approach is necessary for managing identities in multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments. Users must always have consistent access to apps that are hosted on-premises or across several cloud platforms, whether they are logging in from the cloud or the corporate network. The next-generation identity management software that enables this is called identity orchestration.

Regardless of where your applications operate or whatever identity system you employ, Identity Orchestration allows consistent identification and access to them.

Managing identities in a new approach called “Identity Orchestration”

During a cloud migration, new identity silos are created since each cloud platform has its own identity system. The problem is that businesses need to make use of the distinctive features of many cloud platforms, so centralising identities is not the solution. As a result, multi-cloud now also refers to several identities.

In order to guarantee that identities and user access restrictions are consistent across various identity systems and locations, both on-premises and in the cloud, identity orchestration software constructs a logical identity fabric.

What are the key features and capabilities of Identity Orchestration?

Solutions for identity orchestration provide a range of characteristics and abilities, such as:

Visual no-code user interfaces are offered by Identity Orchestration systems, which make workflow automation simple via drag-and-drop or forms-based user interfaces.
Pre-built connections – The majority of Identity Orchestration solutions come with ready-to-use connectors for well-known apps, HCM systems, directory stores, and change management platforms.
Automating the identity lifecycle management process is a feature of most Identity Orchestration solutions. When users join an organisation, change roles, or leave the organisation, identities and access rights are automatically provisioned across a variety of applications and systems.
Event-driven orchestration – It’s crucial to employ Identity Orchestration products that can instantly reprovision identities and access rights in response to event alerts from other apps or threat intelligence systems.

How can Identity Orchestration be used?

Identity orchestration solutions may aid businesses by assisting them with the following:

By providing users with access to essential programmes from day one, you can boost new hire productivity.
By removing provisioning mistakes, permission creep, and inactive accounts, security risk may be decreased.
By removing labour-intensive, time-consuming administrative procedures, you may increase IT efficiency and free up IT resources to concentrate on strategic activities.
By removing difficult coding and scripting efforts, automation complexity and expense may be reduced.

How Identity Orchestration brings value to businesses?

The user experience cannot be compromised in the name of security in the digital enterprise, especially those that link directly to clients, constituents, patients, students, and other consumers. Likewise, security cannot be compromised in order to improve login experiences. Identity orchestration is the key to ensuring both security and user experience, which are two sides of the same coin.

User experience

The secret to attracting and onboarding consumers more quickly and developing the loyalty that keeps them coming back is to provide easy, personalised digital experiences. To assist businesses in meeting the particular demands of customers, the customer identity and access management (CIAM) sector has experienced tremendous growth.

While CIAM used to be primarily focused on marketing, it has evolved into a crucial enabler for organisations that interact with consumers and must satisfy rising expectations for streamlined and secure user experiences as well as personalisation. It has been demonstrated that customer experience has surpassed practically all other factors, including price and product quality, to become a top brand differentiator.

For the workforce, frictionless login processes are equally crucial. When workers can’t access the servers or data they need to complete their tasks, productivity declines and they get angry. Additionally, accessibility issues result in expensive help desk calls. Utilising practical services like single sign-on (SSO), push authentication, and passwordless, modern IAM enables businesses to provide their employees safe and seamless experiences. This skill is essential for sustaining productivity now that using a remote or hybrid workforce is no longer an exception but rather the rule.

Security

A contemporary IAM or CIAM solution can thwart the most frequent sorts of assaults. Threat protection and fraud prevention are at the top of any organization’s priorities list. Unauthorised access, which is directly linked to failures of identity and access management (IAM), was the primary cause of breaches for the fourth year in a row, according to the 2022 ForgeRock Consumer Identity Breach Report.

Traditional IAM technologies and outdated procedures, both within your company and at the third-party suppliers with whom you do business, give malicious actors access to additional sensitive data and allow them to commit fraud, like account takeover (ATO) attacks, using credentials that have already been stolen. To protect your clients and your business from assaults that might result in costly and harmful breaches, it is more crucial than ever to adopt a multi-layered security strategy for IAM that is driven by artificial intelligence (AI).

Protecting against unauthorised access and fraudulent activities while not restricting genuine users has been a recurring concern for security teams. Again, overcoming such obstacles is the job of contemporary identity orchestration.

Your IAM or CIAM platform can track login requests in real-time with an AI-powered orchestration engine. The secure user journey flow may be automatically directed based on the level of risk, allowing easy access for trusted users while demanding step-up authentication from unknown or suspect users. Anomalies, credential stuffing, bots, strange IPs, and other threats are quickly identified by the system’s AI signals.

How Identity Orchestration helps solve modern identity problems

An Identity Orchestration platform is a small piece of software that may be installed on-premises or in the cloud. It operates on a Linux server as a service and receives configuration information from either a local or centralised YAML configuration file.

Connectors, workflows, and app gateways are used by identity orchestration to coordinate behaviour amongst identity systems. Additionally, it creates an abstraction layer that makes it possible for apps to communicate with any identity system without changing their setups or application code. To move rules, settings, and identities, Identity Orchestration may be used with any identity system. Additionally, it may track down and acquire user traits, identity groups, and other data from different identity stores, or it might divert login requests to different identity providers.

The following foundational requirements define Identity Orchestration:

Natively available. To address the widespread issues of multi-cloud and multi-identity use cases, identity orchestration must be designed from the ground up. Retrofitting a centralised identity system to operate in a distributed manner will not make Identity Orchestration successful. This has been seen in the computing industry, where Kubernetes has quickly gained popularity because of its innate ability to handle distributed workloads utilising a distributed design.
Stable identities. By programmatically automating identities into the different identity providers and producing a composite identity profile by combining attributes from various identity providers in real-time, identity orchestration must offer consistent identities across numerous clouds and identity systems.
uniform regulations. By employing an identity abstraction layer to standardise the description of user access rules in a common vocabulary, identity orchestration makes it possible for consistent user access policies. Additionally, it must standardise user access enforcement with meta-policies to close functional gaps in policy that frequently exist between various identity systems.
Layer of identity abstraction. An Identity Fabric, which abstracts away the numerous underlying identity infrastructures used by an organisation, is the foundation of Identity Orchestration. This abstraction layer eliminates the need to get familiar with a variety of APIs and identity systems by combining their APIs, data models, user access controls, and feature sets into a single Identity Fabric.
spread-out deployments. Identity orchestration has to be able to be deployed in a variety of settings that represent the frequently complicated surroundings of today. The coexistence of on-premises and cloud means this. Identity orchestration must handle all types of traffic and operate either as a proxy or next to apps using a sidecar paradigm, both of which require excellent performance. It can offer elastic scalability and rock-solid durability thanks to all of these factors.

These fundamental criteria are essential because they specify what Identity Orchestration must be able to do in order to support the multi-cloud and multi-identity use cases of today.