The year’s end is approaching rapidly, but before we all check out for the year and spend more mental energy than one should on perhaps why jingle bell rock is such a mellow tune or arguing if Die Hard really is a Christmas film - let’s spend a moment to look ahead at what the next year will hold.
There is a pretty significant consolidation of the Identity and Access Management (IAM) market underway which will have a long-tailed impact on customers of the affected vendors. This is likely to cause significant movement in the market as other vendors capture more market share with new and innovative products, particularly in the Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) space.
Artificial Intelligence will force a rethink on IAM data
Artificial intelligence (AI) has seen a massive explosion in 2023, not without some drama, and we can be confident that this will continue in 2024. The rate of development and new use case discovery for how AI can be used across technologies and industries will continue its vertical trajectory. Without doubt, IAM technologies will be impacted by the AI boom and we will see more and more vendors implementing AI-enhanced tooling.
The common challenge for businesses looking to get started with AI projects is dealing with fragmented data across their organization. IAM systems are major culprits of this as it has been in the interest of security to keep it siloed from other data sets like customer relationship platforms (CRMs), customer data platforms (CDPs), enterprise resource planning (ERPs) systems and master data management platforms (MDMs). However, keeping this data separate is no longer in the interests of the business as it will hamper efforts to create an unified view of the customer and support AI initiatives.
The key challenge businesses will need to overcome sooner-rather-than-later is how to connect and unify their IAM data with business data, while still protecting sensitive information. New tooling that approaches data management from an identity centric perspective will be critical to overcoming this challenge.
Authorization will become more intelligent
Connection and unification of Identity and business data is not only useful for AI, but will also have major implications for authorization decisions.
Business data can provide in depth contextualization for digital identities, enabling greater granular control and catering for more complex and intelligent decisions.
The new level of granularity that can be achieved with increased context will be particularly critical for data level authorization decisions and non-human interactions, i.e. machine identity, digital products, AI applications etc.
So while we will see authorization continue to be very human-centric for the foreseeable future, more and more businesses will likely opt for granular tooling to enable future use cases for data-to-data access decisions as more AI applications come online.
Additionally, as AI-readiness increases, we will see more dynamic and externalized authorization models that can leverage contextualized data across applications for orchestrated decisions and customer experience.
Verified credentials are here to stay
The rise of verified credentials will continue as more vendors fill the space and more credential issuers and regulators join the conversation.
Increasing the visibility of trust in digital identities will also likely extend to non-human identities as well, requiring IAM platforms to consider how to capture and leverage whether an entity is verified and to what level of assurance.
In 2024 we will likely see more cross-regional regulations and recognition as demand and use of verified credentials across industries increases.
This will also have implications for the above AI and Authorization predictions as verifying a data source and capturing assurance level holds incredible potential to be extended beyond human identities to all data entities. This can increase trust and veracity of data that is leveraged for both AI applications and authorization decisions in the future.
2024 will not be boring
In a market that historically has moved at a delayed, sluggish pace, we predict 2024 to buck the trend.
With vendor consolidation causing customers to reconsider their IAM strategy, and AI adding pressure from the boardroom down, the next 12 months will likely be a busy year for anyone working with identity, credentials, data management and of course, AI.
For IndyKite, this is ideal as we focussed on offering novel solutions that leverage unified data for IAM use cases, while also demonstrating the value identity data can offer AI applications and other data driven projects.
Want to learn more? Book in a chat with a member of the team and get a head-start on 2024.
