In today's digital age, identity management has become increasingly complex and difficult. The scale of the enterprise continues to expand, and the complexity of the business is also increasing. The traditional manual-based identity management method, due to its low efficiency, can no longer meet the needs of the rapid development of the enterprise. The popularization of smart devices and low-cost acquisition of applications, and the storage and transmission of massive user identity information on mobile terminals also expose user identity management to security risks of information leakage and identity theft.
Therefore, whether enterprises want to improve production efficiency or individuals want to protect private information, they should pay attention to identity management and look for identity and access management solutions that adapt to modern technology trends to meet the identity management challenges brought about by the digital age.
Traditional identity and access management mainly relies on the IAM system. The full name of IAM is Identity and Access Management. It is a management system for maintaining user identities and permissions. It can help users safely control access to resources and help enterprises improve the security of application systems. Protect business data, optimize workflow, and more.
Traditional IAM is a mode of custom development and privatization deployment when performing identity governance for enterprises. Faced with the rapid development of modern technologies such as cloud computing, microservices, and containerization, as well as the trend of enterprise application cloud services, traditional IAM has been unable to meet the needs of modern enterprises, and has exposed many shortcomings in identity management:
- Low maintenance efficiency: Traditional IAM is often managed by professional IT personnel, resulting in complex operations, long construction periods, high usage costs, and complex relationships between various permissions and accounts, resulting in low efficiency of manual operation and maintenance.
- Poor scalability: Traditional IAM is often based on a single technical architecture, so it is difficult to expand. As the scale of the enterprise expands, there will be some relatively obvious limitations. For example, when the number of applications increases, security levels increase, and device types increase, traditional IAM needs to be redeveloped, configured, and deployed.
- Weak operational capabilities: traditional IAM has weak operational capabilities, and it is difficult to meet the business needs of large organizations, for example, to screen out users who have not logged in within six months and send them marketing text messages; or to find those frequently used of users and have them converted by account managers.
- Poor security: Traditional IAM is essentially a centralized permission management system, once attacked, it will have a great impact on the entire system. In addition, more traditional IAM systems generally use databases to store important data such as user information and permission information, making the permission management system a key target for attackers.
01. Adapt to the cloud era and build an identity cloud platform
Identity management is a key link that affects the business efficiency of enterprises, and it is also an important guarantee for maintaining information security. The capabilities and exposed shortcomings of traditional IAM obviously cannot help enterprises effectively deal with identity management issues in the cloud era. In order to make up for the shortcomings of traditional IAM, Okta, Auth0 abroad, and Authing in China have begun to build identity and access management services suitable for the cloud era, and then IDaaS came into being.
IDaaS Identity as a Service (Identity as a Service), providing identity and access management services for enterprises and developers. IDaaS is not simply moving traditional IAM to the cloud to provide services, but an identity cloud platform built on the cloud. With the development of modern technology, IDaaS has become the best solution for identity management in the cloud era.
- Simplified management: IDaaS provides a centralized identity and access management platform that manages user identities and access across the organization from a single, unified console. This can greatly simplify the management process and reduce the consumption of human resources.
- Reduce costs: IDaaS usually adopts a pay-as-you-go cloud model, which has the advantages of elasticity and scalability. Enterprises can subscribe to the application according to the actual development needs, and can flexibly increase or decrease the functions and performance of the service without investing a lot of hardware and human resources. Compared with traditional self-built identity management systems, IDaaS can significantly reduce enterprise IT costs.
- Improve security: IDaaS provides strong authentication and access control functions, which can help enterprises implement multi-level security controls to ensure that only authorized users can obtain appropriate permissions. IDaaS can also integrate other security solutions, such as multi-factor authentication, single sign-on (SSO), etc., to improve overall security.
- Improve user experience: IDaaS provides a friendly user interface and powerful identity management functions. Users can access multiple applications and systems of the organization through single sign-on (SSO), enabling corporate employees to manage their identities more efficiently and conveniently Information and Access Rights.
02. Create a next-generation identity cloud
Authing Identity Cloud , as the first identity cloud platform to implement IDaaS in China, not only has the ability to replace traditional IAM as the enterprise identity governance infrastructure, but also has the advantages of IDaaS to help enterprises improve business efficiency and information security.
Nowadays, the number of Internet users tends to be saturated, the original high-speed growth traffic dividend has gradually disappeared, and the Internet is ushering in an era of fierce competition in stock competition. Having experienced IDaaS from scratch, in order to give full play to the value of the identity platform and help enterprises tap new growth points in the era of stock competition, so as to improve business growth, Authing has created an event-driven cloud-native identity management platform .
cloud native architecture
With the rapid development of cloud computing, more and more enterprises choose to deploy business applications on the cloud environment. According to Gartner's forecast, by 2025, more than 85% of enterprise organizations will accept the cloud-first principle, more than 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms, and cloud migration will become a common phenomenon from a popular trend.
Global cloud migration scale from 2019 to 2025
Authing Identity Cloud is an identity management solution based on cloud-native architecture, which is naturally applicable to the identity management demands of enterprises under the trend of moving to the cloud.
Compared with the traditional IAM deployment method that can only be privatized locally, the Authing identity cloud deployment method has more choices and is more flexible. It not only supports enterprise privatization deployment, but also freely chooses to deploy on cloud services at home and abroad such as AWS, Tencent Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud according to business needs.
In addition to the freedom and flexibility of deployment, the Authing identity cloud adopts microservices and containerization technology, which makes the integrated Authing application system highly scalable and can be easily expanded to meet the ever-increasing user and resource requirements of the enterprise, and can guarantee the business system. stability.
Event-driven architecture and orchestration engine
In the cloud era, not only technology is developing rapidly, but business is also changing rapidly. When Authing Identity Cloud serves top customers in various fields, especially large enterprises and groups, it finds that high real-time performance is the key to protecting data security and maintaining business stability. For example, large groups need high real-time protection of private data, precision manufacturing enterprises High real-time performance is required to manage device usage.
In this context, the Authing identity cloud is reshaped with an event-driven (EDA) architecture, forming a next-generation event-driven identity cloud platform.
Event-driven architecture is a software design pattern based on events and message passing, which divides the various components of the system into two main parts: event sources and event processors. Event source components are responsible for generating and publishing events into the event stream, while event handlers subscribe to the event stream and process each event in a specific way.
The emergence of event-driven architecture has brought more significant loose coupling and reliability of message delivery to business systems. These two characteristics play a vital role in building high-real-time businesses in the cloud era. Because they are the basic capabilities to improve business response speed and overall competitiveness in the cloud era.
The event-driven Authing identity cloud allows enterprises to flexibly customize event-triggered rules according to their own business needs. By automatically processing events in key business scenarios such as internal user directories and permission changes, enterprises can realize efficient and automated operation of business processes.
Employee Onboarding Automation Workflow
In addition, the event-driven orchestration engine enables enterprises to more quickly and conveniently build automated management of the entire life cycle of identity management such as user directories, organizational structures, login authentication, and security management. This not only helps to reduce tedious manual operations and improve work efficiency, but also helps enterprises better manage and maintain a large user base and complex business systems.
metadata
The purpose of an enterprise building an identity center for identity management is to serve the business and promote business development. Also in order to better serve the business, the metadata capability of the Authing identity cloud can map the fields required by the identity management of the enterprise, and store all kinds of dimension data in the metadata, so as to realize the unique Identity source management platform.
Authing metadata can also carry more business-related minimum granular data parameters. Based on these data, precise operation activities can be carried out through identity automation to help enterprise business development.
Metadata is an important foundation of PaaS capabilities. Relying on metadata, realize the PaaS of Authing identity cloud platform, so that enterprises can complete the closed-loop construction of business in Authing identity cloud platform, map business data entities and fields to Authing, and then use identity automation, authority system, authentication platform, etc. Ability to obtain data entities from metadata without passing in through API, which greatly reduces the complexity of cross-system calls.
developer friendly
Authing Identity Cloud follows the API First philosophy and provides all capabilities to developers through APIs. At present, 1000+ APIs have been opened, through which developers can easily integrate identity, signature and authentication services of Authing Identity Cloud in their own applications.
With a series of powerful APIs, developers do not need to face heavy and complicated programming work, no need to write or integrate a large number of related codes, and can easily integrate Authing in their own application systems through simple calls. Features and services of the Identity Cloud. Such a design will help developers greatly improve development efficiency and save development time. At the same time, it can also significantly reduce development costs, and achieve richer and more comprehensive services with less investment, so as to provide better quality for their customers. services.
Authing identity cloud not only needs to better meet the identity authentication and authorization needs of modern enterprises, but also adapts to technological development, and strives to build a next-generation identity cloud platform to provide enterprises with more competitive services, such as elastic cloud-native capabilities and high real-time performance Event-driven architecture, efficient identity cloud automation, developer friendliness, etc.
As a future-oriented IDaaS service, Authing Identity Cloud can help enterprises better deal with complex identity management and access control issues. Compared with traditional IAM, Authing identity cloud has higher scalability, more flexible identity authentication, more security technologies and stronger manageability. At the same time, Authing Identity Cloud can provide enterprises with more competitive services, reduce development and deployment time, optimize business processes, and improve user experience, etc. With the development of new technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence and big data, Authing Identity Cloud will continue to innovate and optimize to create more value for enterprises.