EverydayIdentity

IAM 101: Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) - Your First Line of Defense B - Background (The ‘Why’): The Cracks in Our Digital Armor In the ever-evolving landscape of cyber threats, the humble password, once our digital guardian, has become its weakest link. Every day, headlines scream about data breaches, account takeovers, and identity theft, with a staggering majority tracing back to compromised credentials. The Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report consistently highlights that stolen or weak passwords are the primary vector for cyberattacks....

Introduction Every few years, something comes along that forces identity and access management professionals to rethink the fundamentals. Federated identity changed how we think about trust boundaries. Zero Trust changed how we think about networks. Zero Standing Privilege changed how we think about admin access. Now agents are changing how we think about who is taking actions in our systems. I don’t mean chatbots. I mean autonomous systems that read context, make decisions, and execute real-world actions—send emails, merge code, modify configurations, publish content, interact with APIs—on behalf of a human....

Scaling Identity: Lessons from 100,000+ User Deployments TL;DR What works at 1,000 users breaks at 100,000. Your IAM system performs beautifully with 5,000 employees. Logins are snappy. Directory sync takes minutes. Session management? Not even on your radar. Then you hit 50,000 users—maybe through organic growth, maybe through M&A—and things start… slowing down. By 100,000? That same login that took 200ms now takes 3,500ms. Your directory sync lags 6 hours behind HR....

Identity Data Hygiene & Reconciliation Strategies: The Foundation of Good IAM TL;DR Picture the IAM utopia: one golden source of truth for identity data. Perfect synchronization. Complete attributes. Pristine naming consistency. Beautiful, right? Now wake up. The reality? You’ve got 4-7 identity sources that don’t talk to each other. Half your user records are missing the manager field (because HR didn’t feel like filling it out when they batch-imported 10,000 contractors)....

Compliance-Driven IAM Architecture: Designing for SOX, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and GDPR TL;DR Compliance isn’t optional. But most IAM architectures fail audits anyway. SOX requires segregation of duties and quarterly access certifications. HIPAA mandates unique user identification and automatic logoff. PCI-DSS demands restricted access to cardholder data and quarterly reviews. GDPR requires data minimization and right to erasure. And you’ve got to satisfy all of them simultaneously—usually with the same IAM infrastructure....

AI & ML in Access Governance: Separating Hype from Reality TL;DR Every IGA vendor’s marketing deck promises the same thing: “AI-powered access governance!” “Machine learning automates role mining!” “Intelligent recommendations eliminate manual reviews!” The slides are beautiful. The demos are impressive. The ROI calculator shows 80-90% reduction in manual work. And then you deploy it. The marketing was compelling. The reality? Let’s just say it’s nuanced. Machine learning absolutely helps with access governance....

Access Analytics & User Behavior (UEBA) Implementation: From Theory to Detection TL;DR UEBA promises to detect the undetectable. Insider threats. Compromised accounts. Advanced persistent threats that waltz past your firewall, EDR, and SIEM like they own the place. The pitch sounds amazing: establish behavioral baselines for every user, detect anomalies using machine learning, catch threats signature-based tools miss. John always logs in from Chicago? Sudden login from Moscow is anomalous....

Advanced Consent & Delegation Models: OAuth Scopes, Admin Consent, and Permission Sprawl TL;DR OAuth consent is your new attack surface. And users click “Accept” on it faster than they skip terms of service agreements. Which is to say, instantly. When users click “Sign in with Google” or “Connect to Office 365,” they’re granting third-party applications delegated access to corporate data—email, files, calendars, contacts. Five clicks, and that random productivity app now has “Mail....

Shadow IT Discovery Through Identity Analytics: Making the Invisible Visible TL;DR Here’s a fun number: 1,158. That’s how many cloud applications the average enterprise uses. Wanna guess how many IT actually sanctioned? About 35. Do the math—that’s 97% of your cloud services operating completely outside your visibility. 1,158 apps. You’ve sanctioned maybe 30. The rest? Shadow IT. And here’s the thing—you can’t see them with traditional security tools. Your firewall?...

Cross-Domain Federation & Trust Architectures: Beyond Simple SSO TL;DR Simple SSO? That’s easy. Deploy Okta or Azure AD, federate your apps, users log in once, everyone’s happy. You’re done in three months and it mostly works. Real federation? That’s where things get interesting. And by “interesting,” I mean “this will take 18 months and cost way more than you budgeted.” Here’s the reality: 67% of enterprises have multiple identity domains that need federation (Gartner 2024)....