Cloud adoption continues to accelerate with the promise of reduced costs, increased operational agility, and better IT and business alignment. 71% of enterprises now use three plus cloud providers and the average enterprise employs 1295 cloud services, a lot of which has been driven by the hybrid distributed workforce and increasing number of digital consumer interactions. However, 80% of applications and workloads are still on-prem creating a complex hybrid/multi-cloud reality for IT teams to navigate and secure.

Multi-cloud enterprises are 67% more profitable than those that lag behind, but the journey can be long and fraught with risk. Cloud migration can take 10+ years for a large enterprise creating an ongoing distributed management challenge with users, their profile data and attributes spanning multi-cloud and on-prem systems. As well, multi-cloud will be permanent for the majority with Gartner forecasting that 81% of enterprises will elect to have two or more cloud platform vendors long term to avoid vendor lock-in and increase business resiliency.

Specific hybrid/multi-cloud pain points include:

  • Identity proliferation & identity silos – each public & private cloud platform brings its own identity concept
  • Identity migration – moving identities from on-prem legacy systems to the cloud takes time and resource to do it right
  • Identity coexistence – be prepared to run new systems alongside existing ones without compromising security and user experience
  • Compliance – complicated by diversity of tools, platforms and vendors

With IT resources at a premium, identity orchestration addresses the management challenge of hybrid / multi-cloud environments by acting as a unified identity provider. Orchestration bridges each cloud provider’s access system and between legacy and modern IAM solutions with support for modern authentication protocols including SAML, OIDC, Oauth and SCIM.

IDaaS illustration

Eliminating identity silos simplifies user authentication, authorization and risk policy decisions to enable a Zero Trust approach. As well, identity orchestration provides the flexibility to migrate incrementally to the cloud, avoiding large disruptive shifts.

Watch our webinar to learn more about identity orchestration and how to simplify your hybrid/multi-cloud environment.