Identity Fabric: what it is & why it’s needed in multi-cloud environments

We are in a huge transition period from on-premises identity management to the cloud. And most organizations are straddling both without a guidebook on how to do it.

IT teams struggle today to keep pace as the increased adoption of multi-cloud expands in our new, distributed identity landscape. Though multi-cloud allows for greater speed, agility, and security, it also presents significant challenges.

Legacy applications don’t work in the cloud, leaving serious security gaps. Making apps secure in the cloud(s) traditionally means manually recoding each one, which redirects valuable IT resources from innovation.

An Identity Fabric is a new technology built to manage identities in our multi-cloud and hybrid cloud world. Learn what an Identity Fabric is, how it works, and why it’s necessary to succeed in multi-cloud environments.

What is an Identity Fabric?

An Identity Fabric is a distributed, multi-cloud identity management framework integral to Identity Orchestration software. Using orchestration to manage multiple identity domains on multiple clouds, an Identity Fabric relies on an abstraction layer to manage identities and access policies across cloud vendors.

As a connecting layer that enables orchestration of disparate environments, an Identity Fabric has interwoven threads connecting legacy infrastructures with cloud-based assets. It enables consistent identity and access policy management for multi-cloud and hybrid clouds.   

The Identity Fabric abstraction layer unifies distributed identity providers and infrastructures like MFA, directories, databases, APIs, authentication, and authorization providers. Developers can use a single abstracted API for the entire range of connected systems; enabling consistent identity and access across multiple clouds and vendors.

With no-code or low-code integration, an Identity Fabric eliminates the need to custom code identity into apps for cloud deployment. IT teams can use a configuration, not coding, approach to ‘wire’ apps and identity, making it possible to easily switch one identity provider out for another. Or roll out a new identity service, like passwordless, to apps without rewriting the app.

An Identity Fabric uses Discovery to inventory and map the elements of the extended identity system across multiple clouds. 

Why an Identity Fabric is needed in multi-cloud

Managing IAM in the multi-cloud/hybrid cloud era is often uncharted territory. Like steering a ship through the fog, when visibility is poor, the risks and costs of running aground are high. An Identity Fabric breaks identity lock-in, unifies fragmentation, reduces risk, and enables agility and choice across clouds.

Identity lock-in

Identity vendor lock-in is common in IAM and can add an extra layer of frustration for IT leaders seeking to update their systems, whether due to policy compliance reasons or other business drivers. 

Lock-in often necessitates costly manual development of custom code and risks interruptions to services or unwelcome changes to the user interface. Adding more complexity by migrating to another cloud platform is not always a viable long-term solution. 

Fragmentation & silos

Organizations using more than one cloud must contend with identity fragmentation. Fragmented identity silos and manual IAM for critical infrastructure puts constraints on your business.

An Identity Fabric enables consistent identity and access policies to be implemented across disparate clouds and platforms. 

Cybersecurity threats

Cybercriminals are getting bolder and more sophisticated. But they still go after the low-hanging fruit first — even criminals know there’s value in keeping it simple. The 2021 Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report found that 80 percent of data breaches are derived from the identity space. Passwords are one of the weakest links.

While there’s no substitute for robust threat detection systems, the capacity to instantly deploy IAM updates and enforce policy changes ensures that vulnerabilities are quickly addressed. 

Cybersecurity and IAM are now intrinsically connected across all areas of an organization. 

With the distributed nature of the cloud — and now multiple clouds — a new approach to managing identity is needed.

Agility

An Identity Fabric enables organizations to decouple their infrastructure from their apps, making it possible to easily move apps and workloads across clouds using whatever identity system makes the most sense for the use case.

Orchestrate identities with Strata’s Maverics

The foundation of Strata’s Maverics Identity Orchestration Platform begins with connecting your identity systems together using no-code Maverics Connectors or low-code service extensions. With your identity infrastructure connected, extending access policies to apps is simple.

Maverics provides runtime Identity Control Plane services through purpose-built proxies and webserver modules. Maverics executes runtime identity services like authentication, access control, authorization, MFA, attributes, claims, and token transformations, among others.

Together, the Identity Fabric abstraction layer, the Identity Control Plane, and Policy Administration Plane enable no-code distributed identity management that scales across clouds, vendors, and technologies.

The IT team and CFO are not the only winners with Identity Orchestration. Customers, vendors, and employees across the company benefit from increased openness in your system while contributing to a secure network. 

Discover the future of IAM

Whether you’re seeking to migrate your entire network to the cloud in the short term or want a gradual but efficient transition for some of your key assets, Maverics Identity Orchestration Platform can help you to reach your goals without compromising user experience or incurring costs of labor-intensive rewrites of code.  

Regardless of the complexity of your business or the sensitivity or scale of your operations, there is a simple way to shift to the leading edge of multi-cloud identity trends. 

See how you can reach the first milestone on your journey within 30 days with a free Maverics Trial, or by reaching out to one of our experts for a no-pressure demo of our platform.