CIO Influence Interview with Eric Olden, CEO and Co-founder of Strata Identity

Eric Olden, CEO and Co-founder of Strata Identity, shares insights on the trends shaping the future of IAM, solutions to the challenges enterprises face with multi-cloud adoption, and much more in this CIO catch up:

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How is Maverics Identity Orchestration platform transforming identity management for enterprises operating in multi-cloud environments?

Strata Identity empowers companies to transform and better manage identity and access across their digital infrastructure — whether it’s cloud, hybrid, or multi-cloud. For those that operate across multi-cloud environments, which is the bulk of large enterprises today, we provide them with three main areas of assistance.

First, with Strata, enterprise companies can modernize their identity systems through identity orchestration without the need to modify apps, without impacting the user experience, and without writing any code.  Second, we help them roll out modern authentication such as MFA and passwordless, or whatever is the next biggest thing – to secure any application quickly – with no code changes or app rewrites. Third, we keep their businesses up and running with identity continuity and IAM resiliency, meaning we enable them to switch clouds, scale architecture, change identity providers — again, without the need to touch or recode their apps.

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Our software-as-a-service delivered Maverics Identity Orchestration Platform allows companies to seamlessly integrate and manage multiple cloud and legacy on-premises identity systems without overhauling their existing applications. With Strata, companies can quickly adapt to rapidly evolving technologies, ensure security, and improve efficiencies while conserving operational costs and eliminating complexities.

In your view, what are the most significant trends shaping the future of IAM, and how do you see Strata leading innovation in this space?

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is changing rapidly, and I’ve been there since the beginning. You might be aware that one of my early companies, Securant Technologies, created the first single sign-on product for web applications, and another, called Symplified, was the first Identity as a Service company. I also co-authored the SAML Identity Federation standard for SSO. With Strata IDentity, we created a new category: Identity Orchestration, and it’s another huge leap forward in IAM.

The future of identity, I believe, will be shaped by several trends, including IDaaS, MFA, passwordless, biometric authentication, and zero trust principles. It will also be shaped by several emerging trends, including AI and machine learning, as well as a growing use of decentralized and self-sovereign identities. Of course, we are always being influenced by data protection and privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA, which will influence how we apply controls, usage, and storage of identity data. I’m always looking ahead to anticipate and solve challenges down the road.

Strata’s innovations and our overall approach are designed to easily adapt and scale with the enterprise. We help organizations move forward, modernize, incorporate new authentication technologies, and change/add IDPs as they see fit. The identity abstraction layer in Maverics manages and bridges incompatible systems, unifies IAM, incorporates any IDP, and adapts to changes, whether expected or unexpected, making organizations resilient to current and future requirements.

Maverics works with all architectures, vendors, and platforms. Customers can quickly and securely modernize applications to use cloud-based authentication from Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, Cyberark, and more and integrate legacy authentication stores like LDAP and SQL, without rewriting their apps. They can also deploy OIDC and SAML to apps that don’t speak modern protocols, passwordless, ID verification/proofing, or the next big thing in identity without making any application changes. Maverics works seamlessly in the cloud, on-premises, and across hybrid architectures.

We also provide no-code/low-code Orchestration Recipes that help businesses solve their IAM challenges. It’s similar to cooking, where you might have ingredients on hand but no plan for making a meal. Companies can have multiple IDPs, apps, and identity services but have no idea how to get them all to work together to achieve a specific business outcome. We automate their path to achieve business outcomes like enabling legacy application modernization or implementing multi-cloud access control, passwordless authentication, and support for multiple IDPs.

Recently, we introduced a market-first approach to solve the challenge of identity continuity when a cloud IDP goes offline. If a primary cloud IDP is unavailable for any reason, Maverics provides autonomous failover to either a backup cloud IDP or to an on-premises identity system like Microsoft Active Directory or another local user database. Maverics performs health checks to monitor network and primary IDP connectivity and switches user application access flows back to the primary IDP when service is restored.

Our Maverics platform is revolutionizing identity management in much the same way that virtualization and containerization transformed IT infrastructure, making Strata’s Maverics the “Kubernetes” of identity management.

Highlight the top challenges enterprises face when adopting multi-cloud strategies. What can they do to prepare for these hurdles and successfully overcome them?

Almost every large organization faces the daunting challenge of moving from outdated identity systems to modern, cloud/multi-cloud-based solutions. This has led to a lot of them remaining stuck in a costly and complex “hybrid limbo,” where they have to simultaneously manage old systems and new cloud identity providers. They need to provide access to apps across both public and hybrid clouds while keeping things consistent and secure—without creating a single point of failure in their IAM.

Our Identity Orchestration technology provides a real game changer. With Strata’s Maverics, there’s no need to rewrite every application, which can take months and cost millions.

Strata helps large enterprises modernize their identity infrastructure quickly and efficiently. Maverics makes it easy to implement modern authentication and connects older identity systems with new ones. It secures identities and ensures that policies, APIs, and sessions all work seamlessly together—across all applications, on all clouds, and with any identity provider. It does this while maintaining a consistent user experience without the need for changes to applications.

Another big challenge we’re seeing is making sure IAM systems stay up and running. A disconnect from a cloud identity provider can lead to an immediate loss of access to apps and services. That downtime can be costly — up to $1 million per minute while recovery efforts are underway. IDP outages can happen for various reasons, like configuration issues, network problems, natural disasters, or it can even be part of normal operations, as it is with cruise ships or military operations. Regardless of the cause, Strata provides solutions that ensure failover and connectivity, which helps organizations maintain identity continuity and resilience.

You’ve been a key contributor to standards like SAML and IDQL. What do you see as the next major evolution in identity standards?

As you know, the SAML identity federation standard allows users to move seamlessly between secure websites without relogging in. The next major evolution of identity will be enabling incompatible identity systems, both based cloud-based identity providers and legacy in-premises, to coexist without modifying applications that use them. We have created the Identity Query Language (IDQL) standard and Hexa open-source software (now a CNCF Sandbox project) for multi-cloud policy orchestration, to address the challenges organizations face when modernizing their identity infrastructure.

How do you envision companies integrating modern security features like MFA or passwordless authentication across legacy systems using identity orchestration?

Strata’s Maverics weaves together all apps, clouds and IDPs into a flexible identity fabric. If you need to add or switch to a new identity service, it joins your fabric. It’s a simple, guided process that doesn’t require refactoring of apps, even the legacy apps that don’t ‘speak’ modern authentication. Adding MFA and passwordless work the same way, they are simply incorporated into our identity fabric. Strata’s identity orchestration fabric does all the translating necessary to incorporate everything across cloud, multi-cloud, hybrid and legacy systems.

An important note to add here is that adding passwordless, 2FA, MFA, etc. to your identity fabric doesn’t just eliminate app rewrites — it also makes all changes reversible. So, if something doesn’t work, it’s easy to roll back to your original infrastructure in seconds, without causing outages or requiring any special dev work. Further,  Strata supports multiple concurrent, modern authentication services, so companies can give their users alternate ways to access key information (including to legacy systems). This is especially helpful in the event that users lose their mobile device or hardware key.

We offer a free 30-day trial so that businesses can test out their latest MFA or passwordless solution with their apps using Strata’s Maverics.

We’d love to hear about the books or resources that have inspired your leadership and innovation in the identity management space. Recommend a few of your favorites to today’s emerging IT leaders.

We recently published a book “Identity Orchestration For Dummies,” aimed at CISOs and Identity Architects https://www.strata.io/resources/whitepapers/identity-orchestration-for-dummies/. The book provides a roadmap for modernizing and securing identity and access management from legacy systems to cloud-based identity systems and across multi-clouds.

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