IAM Leaders Guide

Despite the clear benefits of cloud-based identity providers (IDPs), many organizations remain tied to legacy systems due to the complexities of migration. Modern multi-factor authentication (MFA) is essential for enhanced security, streamlined operations, regulatory compliance, and business agility. 

However, achieving advanced authentication requires an updated identity infrastructure, making the business imperative for identity modernization more urgent than ever.

The risks of keeping legacy identity systems

Legacy identity systems, often deeply coupled with on-premises applications, pose significant risks, including: 

• Credential compromise due to lack of MFA support.
• Hardcoded credentials and static access controls make it difficult to update or rotate credentials securely.
• Outdated authentication protocols, like NTLM and older Kerberos, are vulnerable to attacks such as pass-the-hash.
• Infrequent patching and manual updates, leaving known security gaps open for long periods.
• Limited monitoring and auditing capabilities, reducing visibility into potential threats. 

These issues prevent organizations from adapting to modern security challenges, making breaches or unauthorized access more likely. As business landscapes evolve and regulatory demands grow, organizations can no longer afford the risks posed by outdated identity systems.

The benefits of modernizing IAM and authentication

Identity modernization is more than just a technical upgrade—it’s a strategic move that enables organizations to stay ahead of security threats, ensure compliance, and drive operational efficiency. By transitioning to modern identity systems, organizations can:

• Enhance security and reduce risk: Modern IDPs offer advanced security features, such as conditional access policies, to protect against threats.
• Achieve regulatory compliance: Accelerate compliance efforts with a modern identity infrastructure that meets industry standards.
• Improve user experience: Integrate access to applications and data to reduce friction and improve employee productivity.
• Boost operational efficiency: Reduce technical debt and administrative overhead while improving overall IAM hygiene and ensuring continuous protection against credential-based threats.
• Future-proof your business: Meet your business’s and customers’ evolving needs moving forward by investing in modern identity infrastructure today. 
• Mitigate risk of business disruption: Ensure continuous identity availability to prevent downtime from IDP failures and improve business resilience.

Modernizing identity allows organizations to achieve their strategic goals, strengthen security, and improve agility in an increasingly complex digital landscape.

How an Identity Orchestration solution accelerates modernization

Identity Orchestration software streamlines the process of modernizing identity systems, coordinating identity management across various platforms and silos. This approach ensures consistent policies, seamless user experiences, and reduced complexity for IT teams.

The Maverics Identity Orchestration platform allows organizations to establish a unified and consistent approach to identity management, which lessens the risk of a security breach and helps to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. 

Why modernize your IAM now?

Delaying identity modernization increases exposure to evolving security threats. It’s no longer a matter of if a breach will occur, but when. Organizations need to act now to mitigate risks effectively. 

With Maverics, businesses can centralize control and reduce the complexity of managing identity across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The sooner modernization begins, the faster organizations can lower risk and enhance security.

Key benefits of modern identity

Managing and reducing risks

Legacy identity infrastructures increase the likelihood of breaches by exposing organizations to threats like weak access controls, credential compromise, and outdated protocols. Modern IAM addresses these risks by enabling stronger security measures like MFA and SSO across all systems, even those that previously couldn’t support these features.

• Unauthorized access and data breaches: The stakes of unauthorized access are high — potential data breaches, intellectual property theft, regulatory fines, and damage to your brand reputation.
• Compliance and regulatory risks: Enterprises must adhere to various regulatory requirements, such as GDPR, CCPA, and industry-specific standards, such as HIPAA or PCI-DSS.
• Credential compromise and insider threats: Weak or stolen credentials remain a leading cause of security incidents. Extend MFA and SSO to resources that couldn’t integrate those services before without modifications to the applications. 
• Expanded attack surface: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments expose organizations to more attack vectors. Modern IAM consolidates identity control into a single, unified fabric, reducing the risk of unauthorized access across distributed environments.
• Reputational damage and loss of customer trust: A data breach can severely damage customer trust. By modernizing identity, organizations can safeguard their reputation by preventing unauthorized access and ensuring data remains secure.

The Maverics Identity Orchestration Platform by Strata Identity reduces these risks by centralizing control, allowing organizations to leverage modern identity tools, and act as policy enforcement and decision points —no matter which IDP protects your apps.

Reducing the costs for legacy identity infrastructure  

Maintaining outdated identity systems is financially and operationally taxing. The costs of licensing, infrastructure, and technical debt can run into millions of dollars annually. Outages in legacy systems further lead to expensive downtime, interrupting business operations.

Strata’s Maverics platform helps organizations save by: 

• Replacing legacy systems and eliminating EOL licensing and support costs.
• Simplifying application updates through no-code app identity modernization, avoiding costly rewrites and reducing development costs.
• Ensuring failover between IDPs, preventing costly operational disruptions with Strata’s solution for continuous identity.

Demonstrating compliance and resilience

Meeting regulatory mandates, especially for advanced authentication like MFA, can be difficult, especially for non-standard or legacy applications. Compliance requires two main things:

• Proof of compliance. Regulations like the Digital Operations Resilience Act (DORA) in the EU and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework require proof of compliance and the ability to keep data secure and applications safe from threats. 
• Resilience beyond recovery. The time it takes to restore operations can cause catastrophic damage. Today, backup and recovery is not enough. Organizations need to ensure connection to critical business applications even during IDP outages or other internet disruptions. 

Strata’s Maverics platform makes it easy to:

• Integrate modern authentication, such as MFA and passwordless options, without rewriting applications.
• Ensure continuous identity availability and compliance with global data privacy regulations by maintaining a resilient IAM infrastructure.
• Demonstrate compliance to auditors by maintaining audit trails and performing regular failover tests.

With Identity Continuity, organizations can achieve operational resilience by configuring failover mechanisms and providing detailed compliance reports.

Achieve resilience with Maverics Identity Continuity 

Achieving resilience for the IAM layer is relatively straightforward with Identity Continuity in Maverics. Here’s a quick walkthrough of how to do it: 

• To start, inventory your applications and identity systems and label and organize them based on risk, compliance, and acceptable downtime.
• Then, starting with the most critical applications, define the primary identity provider you want to use to access an application. 
• Then define a secondary identity provider that you want to failover to in the event of an outage. Then configure the IDP health event data to feed your DevOps reporting tools to improve visibility of the IAM layer to operations.
• A resiliency best practice is to write up a run book and validate it by performing periodic tests of the configuration to ensure that everything behaves as expected. Providing reports and test logs to auditors streamlines compliance.

Strata enables you to easily demonstrate that identity and access policies are in place and enforced consistently.

Qualify for today’s cybersecurity insurance coverage

Cyber insurance has become indispensable for safeguarding businesses from the devastating consequences of breaches, hacks, and outages. 

• As many cyberattacks exploit compromised credentials, insurers are increasingly mandating multi-factor authentication (MFA) as a prerequisite for coverage.

• For organizations trying to achieve zero trust, having MFA in front of every application, even non-standard ones, is non-negotiable for many cybersecurity insurance plans. Without it, insurance is either very high or impossible to get. 

Maverics solves this by integrating MFA across all applications — modern and legacy — ensuring compliance with insurance requirements and simplifying the process of obtaining coverage.

Streamlining mergers, acquisitions & divestitures (M&A)

Mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures accelerate identity management transformation because integration timelines are often very tight, and there is no margin for error.

 Some identity challenges that can derail an M&A include: 

• Managing the coexistence of multiple IDPs which often requires the new company and the original company to maintain separate identities for workforces and customers during integration.
• Reconciling differences in separate identity systems across the two companies can cause issues with MFA and security gaps. 
• Ensuring strong security controls remain in place across systems at all times so employees, contractors, and partners can always access essential data and systems.

With modern identity management in place, mergers and acquisitions (and divestitures) are much more predictable, and their success is achievable. Strata Identity’s Orchestration solution helps make M&As smoother by:

• Allowing organizations to merge identity systems without losing security or functionality.
• Normalizing identity namespaces and ensuring consistent security policies across both organizations.
• Supporting cloud migration and decommissioning on-premises identity infrastructure, ensuring smooth transitions without downtime or security gaps.

Why modernize identity with Strata?

Drawing on decades of experience in identity management, Strata’s Maverics platform is built to handle the most complex enterprise environments. Our platform seamlessly integrates with all generations of identity solutions, delivering performance and reliability from legacy systems to cutting-edge technologies.

• No app rewrites: Maverics eliminates the need for costly application rewrites, reducing time and expense.
• Programmatic app onboarding. Maverics supports Dynamic Client Registration (DCR) for OIDC apps, SAML, and proxy apps, making it easy to register applications automatically in Maverics.
• Application and policy discovery. Use Hexa (and soon Maverics) to discover the resources and policies of your cloud-based applications. The Maverics SiteMinder discovery tool analyzes apps and integration patterns.
• Vendor agnostic integration: Maverics works with virtually every identity provider, breaking vendor lock-in and enabling seamless transitions. Our commitment to being vendor agnostic is evident in our contributions to industry standards like SAML and IDQL, which break lock-in and promote choice in identity management. 
• Token transformation and identity discovery: Maverics supports transforming identity tokens across different protocols, ensuring compatibility across systems.
• Orchestration recipes: Pre-built recipes automate tasks like MFA and passwordless rollouts, ensuring quick deployment.
• Maverics IDP Picker Orchestration Recipe. This orchestration recipe makes it easy to offer users a choice of which IDP to use. For instance, employees authenticate using Entra ID, while customers authenticate using Auth0.
• Standards that break lock-in. Strata is an ardent supporter of standards. Our co-founder was a coauthor of SAML and saw firsthand how standards break lock-in. Strata has invested in the community the new policy orchestration standard Identity Query Language (IDQL) and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s pioneering open-source Hexa implementation.
• Multiple ways to customize orchestration. Maverics provides a UI for the visual configuration of policies. And service extensions make it really easy to programmatically extend and customize orchestrations.

Strata’s experience with identity modernization is unmatched, having successfully executed numerous projects for Fortune 500 companies. 

What does a successful modernization project look like?

Strata’s Quick Start program is designed to get organizations up and running quickly. The first 4 applications and two IDPs are deployed into lower environments within 90 days (exceptions exist for certain apps).

Maverics enables the modernization of hundreds of applications per 90-day quarter, scaling as needed to meet the organization’s requirements. With extensive integrations, Maverics simplifies the management of identity modernization projects, ensuring a smooth transition and minimal disruption to business operations.

Scaling modernization with an identity integration factory model

To accelerate identity modernization, Strata has developed a series of best practices that make modernization predictable and manageable. 

• Step 1. Inventory your applications and organize them into SAML, OIDC, and proxy authentication patterns.
• Step 2. Inventory your policies in your existing IDPs and replicate policies in your cloud IDP.
• Step 3. In batches, grouped by pattern, begin configuring the identity orchestrator to apply the appropriate authentication method for each application. This does not require any change to the application, as it is configured upstream in the identity orchestrator.
• Step 4. Once all applications have been modernized to use the cloud IDP, you can de-provision the legacy IDP completely.

Example of a post-modernization roadmap

What do you do with Identity Orchestration after the modernization projects are done? The Maverics Identity Orchestration Platform runs as infrastructure in your environment. 

There are countless ways to use Identity Orchestration. 

Common use cases include:

1. Identity Orchestration use cases (see Orchestration Recipes). Maverics supports hundreds of different use cases called Orchestration Recipes (link) that automate tasks like rolling out MFA, and passwordless or custom onboarding user flows.
2. Identity Continuity is a solution for real-time availability and failover of identity providers (IDPs) that ensures your applications have resilient identities even in the event of an outage.

Once the initial identity modernization project is complete, Maverics will continue to provide value through its orchestration platform. The platform supports a wide range of use cases, from rolling out MFA and passwordless authentication to ensuring identity continuity during IDP failures.

Modernize identity now with Maverics Identity Orchestration

Identity modernization is no longer optional for businesses looking to stay competitive and secure in the digital age. With Strata’s Maverics platform, organizations can reduce costs, enhance compliance, mitigate risks, and enable new revenue streams, all while maintaining the flexibility to adapt to future identity management challenges.

Don’t let legacy systems hold your organization back—modernize today to unlock your full potential. 

What does a successful modernization project look like?

Strata’s Quick Start program is designed to get organizations up and running quickly. The first 4 applications and two IDPs are deployed into lower environments within 90 days (exceptions exist for certain apps).

Maverics enables the modernization of hundreds of applications per 90-day quarter, scaling as needed to meet the organization’s requirements. With extensive integrations, Maverics simplifies the management of identity modernization projects, ensuring a smooth transition and minimal disruption to business operations.

Scaling modernization with an identity integration factory model

To accelerate identity modernization, Strata has developed a series of best practices that make modernization predictable and manageable. 

• Step 1. Inventory your applications and organize them into SAML, OIDC, and proxy authentication patterns.
• Step 2. Inventory your policies in your existing IDPs and replicate policies in your cloud IDP. 
• Step 3. In batches, grouped by pattern, begin configuring the identity orchestrator to apply the appropriate authentication method for each application. This does not require any change to the application, as it is configured upstream in the identity orchestrator.
• Step 4. Once all applications have been modernized to use the cloud IDP, you can de-provision the legacy IDP completely. 

Before and after Modernization with Strata’s Maverics Platform

Example of a post-modernization roadmap

What do you do with Identity Orchestration after the modernization projects are done? The Maverics Identity Orchestration Platform runs as infrastructure in your environment. 

There are countless ways to use Identity Orchestration. 

Common use cases include:

1. Identity Orchestration use cases (see Orchestration Recipes). Maverics supports hundreds of different use cases called Orchestration Recipes (link) that automate tasks like rolling out MFA, and passwordless or custom onboarding user flows.
2. Identity Continuity is a solution for real-time availability and failover of identity providers (IDPs) that ensures your applications have resilient identities even in the event of an outage.

Once the initial identity modernization project is complete, Maverics will continue to provide value through its orchestration platform. The platform supports a wide range of use cases, from rolling out MFA and passwordless authentication to ensuring identity continuity during IDP failures.