5 Key Takeaways from Identiverse 2019

The 10th year of Identiverse kicked off with a promise of being a year’s worth of learning in 4 days. Verdict? They delivered! The masterclasses, bootcamps, sessions, talks, networking dinners and keynotes saw IAM leaders congregate and reinforce what we already knew – security in the digital world revolves around identity.

Attending Identiverse made one thing clear, the Identity Universe is vast and ever-expanding. But there were 5 key trends that kept surfacing time and time again. Those have made their way into this piece as my top takeaways from the event.

Customer Identity Management

It’s a data deluge out there and a big chunk of the information is personal and confidential. It isn’t easy to balance a seamless experience with security and this is where the challenge lies. Making security frictionless to provide a better customer experience will be a prime concern for organizations. The focus will be on risk-based authentication and adopting standards such as FIDO 2.0 that enable password-less authentication. Identiverse 2019 also talked extensively about Zero Trust Identity Security – based on the principle “never trust, always verify” no matter where a person or device is operating – is gaining considerable momentum and the trend is here to stay.

Privacy

We have gone from “private by default to identify/correlate by default”. The consumer backlash resulting from data breaches and misuse of personal data without their consent has led to stricter laws and bills being passed at national levels across the world., Organizations that respect customer privacy will gain customer trust and will see customer retention and growth. Want to revolutionize an industry? Focus on privacy and how it can be a business enabler.

Privileged User Management

Organizations today are operating with various levels of complexities and individual access to data is more customized than ever before. How much power and control are you giving to a certain set of employees? Acing the management, control and security of privileged access is akin to successfully guarding the keys to your IT kingdom.

Self-Sovereign Identity

Identity is many things, a central part of society, a means to access and a commodity. As businesses increasingly commodify identity for some serious gains, it’s only fair to provide individuals and organizations certain claims to those pieces of information. That is the basic premise of the concept of ‘self-sovereign identity’, providing an individual or entity ownership and control over their identity by allowing portability and privacy through selective sharing on an as-needed basis.

IAM modernization

Identity and Access modernization is all about building or moving to the next-gen security services platform that supports new ways of doing business in the increasingly omni-channel digital world. Adoption of cloud, machine learning and new products and solutions in the market to improve operational efficiency and reduce risk are some key drivers. We believe automation and self-service will accelerate modernization initiatives as well as adoption of new platforms.

As Identiverse closes, the thoughts, ideas and insights of radical thought leaders still ring fresh. The challenges around identity are massive but some of the brightest minds in the world are working to resolve them. In a digital world, we will see connected device proliferation and we need to start thinking of their identities, security, and solutions that scale to billions of identities. The intention behind conferences of this nature is always to get together, explore, create and of course, dream! Speaking of dreaming big, I cannot end this blog without mentioning several keynotes by industry leaders and veterans. A shout out to Rep. Bill Foster of Illinois for a very memorable keynote emphasizing the importance of cybersecurity and also the one by Steve Wozniak and his observations around the future of technology and the role ‘identity’ will play in it.