Multi-Cloud Identity Orchestration — What Does the Future Look Like?

Cloud computing has offered endless business opportunities to enterprises embarking on a digital transformation journey. 

Whether we talk about SMEs or renowned brands, everyone is on the verge of adopting the latest cloud computing technologies to stay ahead of the curve. 

However, with increasing global cloud adoption, the challenges pertaining to managing privacy and security risks can’t be overlooked. And things become extremely challenging in the identity management landscape. 

However, businesses adopt various cloud security and identity management standards; none were eventually designed and deployed to address multi-cloud policy and associated challenges. As a result, companies cannot handle various policy orchestration requirements which multi-cloud identity management needs. 

Hence, there’s an immediate need to bridge various identity silos that can help establish a focus on open standards since this approach could eventually solve different technology and software-related challenges in multi-cloud environments. 

Let’s look closely at some aspects of open standards and multi-cloud identity orchestration. 

The Emergence of Multi-Cloud Frameworks and Identity Management 

Over the past decade, the emergence of multi-cloud frameworks has set a new standard for enterprises seeking digital transformation. As per a 2022 survey, around 37% of respondents agreed that they already use private clouds, and the numbers are surging exponentially. 

On the other hand, managing complex identities across a vastly distributed environment seems an uphill battle since organizations must accommodate and closely work access policies on multiple clouds, identity systems, applications, networking, and on-premise systems. 

Hence, in this mashup of diverse systems, the data regulation and privacy policies get fragmented and are held within different silos created in clouds and on-premise systems with their policies, workflows, and processes. And this complicates things, even more, leading to errors and expensive data management. 

Also, there’s no unified and organized way of auditing every identity system for governance and compliance. This is because the existing governance and identity standards like OAuth aren’t designed to orchestrate specific policies across multiple identity and cloud systems. 

As a result, businesses often find themselves involved in managing specific policies related to fragmentation, access management, and data redundancy. 

What’s more worrisome is that regulatory compliances, including the GDPR and CCPA, are becoming increasingly stringent since the public expectations regarding privacy and data security are growing. Hence, strong identity management becomes the need of the hour for every business. 

Reimagining Identity Management in the Cloud 

To improve today’s chaotic working environment and frameworks, businesses must emphasize reengineering identity management. And enterprises should focus on bridging the gap between various identity systems spread in multi-cloud environments. 

And what’s even more important is to build a solution that addresses orchestration-related issues and must accommodate different protocols and controls used by individual apps and clouds. 

Furthermore, the policy orchestration solution should address various other issues, including access control, authentication, authorization, identity providers, and encryption. 

In a nutshell, the goal is to minimize, if not eliminate, the frequent need for manual changes and updates. 

Open Source Is Opening New Doors to Opportunities

Businesses should focus on building SAML (so that security and identity are interchangeable), eliminate user friction, and enhance overall safety for everyone within the network. 

However, there exist specific new challenges that require new thinking that can lead to the creation of SAML along with other essential protocols. 

In conclusion, we need an open standard that can perform the following functions to address multi-cloud policy orchestration needs: 

• Create consistent identity management and access policies. 
• Define access and identity policies in declarative syntax so users can easily understand. 
• Available free of cost in open source to ensure quick adoption and user contribution. 
• Developed in the vendor-neutral forum.

Why This Is the Best Time to Consider Open Source for Cloud Development 

With the advancement of cloud computing and distributed systems, open source has offered endless opportunities to businesses in terms of speed, flexibility, and customization. Here’s the list of some of the reasons why this is the perfect time to rely on open source: 

1. Transparency

Transparency is undoubtedly one of the biggest reasons open source is considered the game changer for businesses relying on cloud computing. 

Many people may confuse open source with an alternative that has no transparency. However, open source is always backed by a strong community that ensures the highest level of transparency. 

More transparency makes business systems robustly available and can be monitored accordingly for flawless performance.

2. No More Vendor Lock-Ins

Most businesses face challenges associated with vendor lock-ins as they embrace the cloud since most cloud providers use this strategy to engage customers. 

Once an enterprise chooses a vendor, there’s no way to change the same for years. And this can limit the options and the number of opportunities a brand could get. 

However, with open source technologies, enterprises aren’t restricted to a single cloud provider and can choose multiple vendors since these technologies are platform-neutral. 

Enterprises can quickly integrate their existing infrastructure and enjoy extensibility with scalability. 

3. Compatibility 

Businesses can embrace unified compatibility with other cloud environments by adopting an open source cloud. 

Since businesses that rely on hybrid cloud setup require continuous delivery, an open source cloud deployment could be easily tweaked depending on the specific business needs, unlike the conventional cloud deployments that primarily focus on vendor needs. 

Open source is not just backward compatible but eventually supports a variety of cloud solutions. Hence, it integrates with endless devices, applications, and networks hassle-free. 

Enterprises can embrace open source compatibility when they handle complex scenarios requiring connection workloads in different distributed clouds. 

4. Control 

While most businesses leverage hybrid cloud and multi-cloud strategies, delivering outstanding results has become an uphill battle with conventional deployment models. 

With open source cloud deployment, businesses can overcome the challenges of performance and control, which is perhaps the most crucial aspect that encourages open source deployment. 

Conventionally, developer tools couldn’t work on different platforms and tools due to flexibility and compatibility-related issues. However, with open-source deployment, businesses can work on several other devices, eventually improving functionality. 

Final Thoughts 

The open-source policy orchestration framework has expanded the possibilities and the marketplace for every user and business. 

And it’s undeniably a long-term solution for every issue related to identity management, access control, authentication and authorization, and managing on-premises and cloud data storage. 

Businesses must adopt the above policies to ensure minimum hassle while managing access control and identities.