The Cloud Era and Identity

This chapter will discuss the current technology landscape. It will provide a basic idea about the trends, the evolution of technology, and the typical challenges of identity management and governance at this moment in time. Knowing the current technology landscape promotes interoperability because then, organizations can easily collaborate by using common standards and enterprise architects are equipped with the means to design modern, secure, and reliable applications.

This chapter is focused on preparing you to better understand the technical details that will be provided in the upcoming sections.

In this chapter, we’ll cover the following topics:

• The cloud era
• Identity in the cloud era
• The challenges of identity
• The cloud identity
• A hybrid identity
• The future of identity

The cloud era

The cloud is boosting productivity and changing the components and tools used in application architectures, which, in turn, are affecting the way software is designed.

As a matter of fact, according to Gartner’s research, the total cloud market will reach something around 600,000,000,000 (billion) USD of overall revenue before 2023 with a double-digit percentage increase year by year.

As outlined in the previous chapter, user requirements are evolving, growing, and changing, and as a consequence, the technology paradigms, standards, and patterns are following the user requirements and evolving in parallel. In this chapter, we are going to have a detailed look at the impact market change has had on technology and software development, specifically identity.

We’ll start by viewing the present-day technology from a high-level point of view, regardless of the specific identity. If we think about IT a few years ago, there was the concept of a system...

Identity in the cloud era

Nowadays, there are plenty of standards, protocols, and practices related to identity. Some of them have been outlined in the previous chapter and are must-know concepts for an identity expert. Regardless, these concepts can get very complicated.

Just to give a brief idea of what we are talking about, the following is a list (but not an exhaustive report) of the available standards at the time of writing. It is important to note that some of the standards or protocols we have mentioned are still in draft (under development) at the time of writing:

• Passwordless:
  • World Wide Web Consortium (W3C):
    • WebAuthn
  • FIDO:
    • Client to Authenticator Protocol (CTAP)
• Authentication/authorization:
  • OpenID Foundation:
    • OpenID Connect
    • Continuous Access Evaluation Protocol (CAEP)
    • Shared Signals and Events
    • FastFed
    • OpenID Connect Federation (https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-federation-1_0.html)
  • IETF:
    • OAuth
    • System for Cross-Domain Identity Management (SCIM)
    • Grant Negotiation...

The challenges of identity

When we think about the definition of a new specification, a new standard, or a new protocol in the identity area, we may imagine a lot of experts having multiple meetings to look for an optimal solution and define the perfect standard. What we tend to underestimate is that these experts cannot invent a new protocol without taking into account several technical constraints and the technical limitation of the market. In other words, their output is usually a trade-off. They need to consider how the browsers work, how HTTP works, what the behaviors of the browser on specific HTTP returning code are, and how the standard they are going to define usually sits on top of this. They cannot just invent what they believe is a perfect protocol from scratch.

This is because the history of IT and, more specifically, the internet clearly shows that de facto standards are much harder to bypass – we cannot force a model if this model requires a change in technology...

The cloud identity

In identity, standards are a serious thing. According to the Business Dictionary (https://businessdictionary.info/), a standard is defined as a “formulation, publication and implementation of guidelines, rules, and specification for common and repeated use, aimed at achieving the optimum degree of order or uniformity in a given context, discipline, or field.” This sentence encompasses brilliantly why standardization is so important – by adopting standards and protocols commonly agreed upon by a vast community of people, enterprises are enabled to make choices without having an active participation in the realization of the model that needs to be developed.

In the previous chapter, we talked about the cloud being a hugely transformational phenomenon that has greatly impacted our lives by making a plethora of services available to people in all parts of the world, all thanks to the distributed nature of cloud services.

Up-and-coming companies...

A hybrid identity

As already touched on in the previous chapter, before the advent of the public internet and cloud technologies that gradually decentralized the services accessed by an organization outside of the organization’s perimeter, it was sufficient to provide users with an authentication model that granted access to internal assets. Information technology efforts were mainly focused on keeping the perimeter secure and preventing malicious users from breaching security defenses and, consequently, accessing sensitive assets within the organization’s internal network.

Let’s imagine the typical workday of an employee, Alice, in the early 2000s. Alice is a part of the engineering team of a big manufacturing company and she needs to use several services to fulfill her role and responsibilities. Alice turns on her Personal Computer (PC) first thing in the morning and logs into the operating system. She then starts her mail client to access her emails. Next...

The future of identity

Cloud, hybrid, and federated identities have been around for years and still many enterprises are struggling to fully harness their full potential. We hope that after reading this book, you will be one of those people that successfully survived the design and implementation stage of a good identity strategy in their organization.

However, technology is never static; it’s an ongoing stream of change that constantly veers toward the next breakthrough that will radically change our lives, so you may wonder what the next big thing for identity is.

First, let’s understand the factors that contribute to the need to have a different way of managing identities and the credentials associated with them. We already know that credentials are part of our daily lives. We are not just referring to digital credentials but to credentials as a broader concept, such as the government ID that your state has issued to you or the degree you received from your university...

Summary

In this chapter, we explored the differences between cloud and hybrid identities, why they are important for an enterprise, and how they relate to each other. Synchronization protocols such as SCIM help an organization keep its different identity systems under control and allow them to seamlessly integrate legacy and modern identities. This chapter also provided an overview of the current state of technology, and we outlined the points that affect protocol creation, as well as the important pillars an enterprise-grade design needs to take into account. This helped us to not only understand what it is today but also the trends and the possible implications of the next-generation protocols that will be based on technology aspects not yet adopted. A great example of what we can expect in the future is represented by third-party cookie removal by browsers, which, in turn, will likely contribute to evolving protocols and standards.

With these concepts in mind, we are ready to...