Cloudentity Blog

We tend to think of “Identity” as a static thing. I’m “me” and I can prove it! Only my “identity” is extremely fluid. Identity, in the IAM world of Identity Access Management, isn’t just me proving I’m Michael Bissell, but it’s me proving that I’m allowed to do things, and therein lies the challenge.

To be honest, most companies still use their IdP (Identity Provider) as a way to login with AuthN, plain old Authentication. They think they’re doing AuthZ (Authorization), but in reality, you have a fractured Identity strategy any time you have a system that has to make a second call to a database after I log in, just to figure out what I get to do.

I started my career back in the days when we hosted servers in the basement of the office. At the time, we never really thought much about security until we deployed the code (which pretty much meant FTPing a bunch of files to a server). Security was handled at the router first – block malicious traffic from getting in the door. Then we locked down the firewall on the server itself (no, you can’t telnet from outside the building).