How orchestration unlocks identity in multi-cloud

Last year set a new high water mark for cloud adoption, especially hybrid cloud environments that combine on-premises and cloud-based apps and identities.

According to one survey, businesses on average spent 23% more than budgeted on cloud services in 2020 and expect to increase their cloud spend by 47% in 2021.  Almost 6 out of 10 enterprises said they used the cloud more than expected.  

In hybrid and multi-cloud environments, users, their profile data, and attributes are spread across incompatible newer cloud and legacy on-premises identity systems. This creates a complex distributed management challenge.

In a recent article for IT Toolbox, Strata CEO describes it this way:

“This expansion means many companies may be mixing and matching old, legacy systems they have in-house with multiple cloud platforms — each with their respective identity systems — and those old, on-premises apps need to be rewritten to mesh with the new cloud platforms. For example, you can have systems that are decades old managing identities in multiple silos like HR systems and databases, while cloud providers use modern tools that manage users and policies their own way.”

Solving this distributed identity management challenge requires a new approach that breaks with the conventional centralization mindset.

A new model called identity orchestration can allow multiple proprietary identity systems to coexist.

Acting as a doorman, holding the different keys and enforcing the different access policies. To understand how orchestration unlocks identity in multi-cloud, Olden offers this analogy:

“Imagine a hallway of doors, some which open with keys and others with keycards, and some won’t open at all. An identity orchestration system will know what it takes to authenticate the user — whether it’s a cookie or an authentication protocol like OpenID Connect or HTTP header.” 

To keep learning about how orchestration unlocks identity in multi-cloud, read the full article here.