Imagine this scenario – If you are the CEO of a mid-sized organization with branches in different continents and three thousand employees, how efficiently could you monitor logins?Perhaps, on a bad day, an employee would have lost their Smartphone or lost the paper in which they wrote the password.In such a case, would you identify that one illegal or criminal login from all the 3000 logins that day?
This is why Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions are gaining increasing prominence in 2020 for businesses to protect their interests and sensitive data from theft and violation.While decentralized identity is yet to become a full-blown practice, passwords are still the prime source for protecting data, and IoT devices are continuously being hacked. In this scenario, we are yet to find a universal solution to manage online identities in both the government and the private sector.

Since the IAM space is continuously evolving, organizations identify new trends in Identity and Access Management to minimize data-breaches, meet regulatory requirements, and manage user identities to the utmost extent.

Years of data breaches stemming from credential theft, attacks targeting privileged user accounts and poor password practices have led to a major evolution in identity and access management technology designed to protect enterprise data.
Five IAM trends are addressing the need for greater user account and network protection. They are meant to mitigate the damage that could be done as network perimeters are erased, organizations move more applications to the cloud and enterprises increase overall complexity.

Identity and Access Management (IAM) has the attention of cybersecurity professionals around the world. The identity and access management market growth has roughly quadrupled over just the last three years, and shows no signs of slowing down any time soon.

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised the visibility of identity & access management (IAM) due to the high priority in getting remote access secured and the increased protection needed around digital transformation initiatives.

In an effort to make organizations more secure, agile and resilient, IAM leaders must improve governance and strengthen privileged access management (PAM) practices to prevent breaches, establish more robust and agile authentication and authorization, and enhance consumer IAM to prevent fraud and protect privacy.

In this rapidly changing business scenario, here are upcoming trends that promise to revolutionize the IAM sector:

1) Adapting Biometrics

As per Global Market Insights, the global biometric market would reach an estimated value of USD 50 billion by the end of 2024. Perhaps one of the rapidly emerging trends in the IAM sector, biometrics like retinal scans, facial recognition systems, and fingerprints, is highly preferred for ensuring authorized users in networked systems. While this might come across as a fool-proof strategy, there is a security risk involved with this technology.

With various types of cyber-attacks possible, biometric information can be stolen and used for fraudulent operations. While a regular password can be changed if compromised, a user’s biometrics can’t be changed and permanent.

To counterbalance this threat, the future trend would involve IAM, which relies on biometric data, to get an additional layer of security for protecting the biometric information.

2) Blockchain

An ideal solution to protect biometric data is that Blockchain has come a long way from being valued at USD 706 million to an estimated USD 60 million by 2024. Blockchain offers features like transparency, reliability, and integrity, making it a popular choice for ensuring data protection with both public and private sectors.

While talking about Blockchain in the context of IAM, the two aspects, the come into play are – Audit trail and self-sovereign identity. Self-sovereign identity is the concept of an individual protecting their entire identity as their personal property rather than let an organization or third-party provider manage it. By keeping the individual’s information protected by encryption in a permanent blockchain across a distributed network system, this concept offers complete individual control over their identity data.

Through the Self-sovereign identity system, the idea is to replace centralized identity providers and instead let each individual take control and decrypt the data only when required.

Audit trail, a user’s entire login history, access request, permission grants, changes performed, or engagement is recorded. This is helpful for an organization in monitoring activities, detecting fraud, and also meets compliance requirements.

3) Single Sign-On Systems and MFA

While MFA is one of the most popular IAM practices, there is still plenty of scope for its improvement as data breaches still occur and cause substantial revenue losses. Adaptive Authentication is the advanced version of MFA, which relies on machine learning capabilities to detect malicious user behavior or illegal entry.

Adaptive Authentication pulls in all the details of user login in terms of login time, device, location, browser, and other data, which helps analyze a login attempt’s authenticity. Based on the analysis, if a login attempt turns out to be fishy, the system will ask the user to fill in an MFA to be authenticated.

Another popular IAM industry trend is Single Sign-on (SSO System) usage with MFA that helps users leverage a unified, singular set of credentials to gain access to networks, data, applications, web, and the cloud.

4) IAM and the Internet of Things (IoT)

With the arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT), there is a massive requirement for Identity Access Management service. Whenever an IoT based device is added to a network, there increases the need to mitigate security risk. Based on a report developed by Microsoft, IoT is increasingly being used across all major sectors, and by 20201, 94% of businesses will use IoT.

Hence, the current priority is to ensure secure identity access management on these IoT devices for restricting the entry of hackers into the network. Devices that can pose a threat could feature smart TVs, security cameras, and smart bulbs.

Another technology that could prove to be a breakthrough is working on IAM systems, which require the system to authenticate a user’s access through numerous devices.

Also, in numerous cases, securing IoT devices would be achieved by embedding the device identities in the processing chip and being an integral part of the hardware.

5) Artificial Intelligence in IAM

An aspect of Identity Management, Context-based identity, is responsible for comparing data about a user who needs to be vetted to authenticate an identity. This data includes numerous behavioral patterns like physical location, IP address, usage, preferences, and machine address.

Leveraging AI programming algorithms for data mining helps discover data patterns that are extremely helpful in reducing fraud and identifying risks. This technique has been highly useful in banking systems across the globe.

6) Identity Access Management for Cloud Services

Since the cloud is in great demand, organizations have been shifting to cloud services to provide advantages such as efficiency, scalability, and flexibility. While the cloud brings many benefits, few security concerns should not be ignored.

Soffid approach to IAM services and solutions is built on core activities, namely, Access Management, Identity Management, Access Governance, and PAM. We help you elevate your organization’s goals towards digital transformation and help develop data strategies in line with revenue maximization and achieve customer satisfaction.

 

(1) Gartner
(2)  Search Security