Future Vision in IAM Program: Federal Executive Forum

Editor’s note: Ashley Stevenson, Identity Technology Director in ForgeRock’s office of the CTO, and head of our Federal business unit, was a panelist on the Federal Executive Forum radio show in late 2015. He appeared on the Identity & Access Management In Government Progress & Best Practices panel alongside execs from Dell, Symantec and immixGroup, and officials from the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense and the NIST. We’re running excerpts from Ashley’s remarks alongside clips from the show. Here's the second clip:

 

On the Future of Identity

The future, which is happening right now, is that there’s a whole new class of identities joining the ecosystem, and that is connected devices. They need the same set of identity characteristics that we’ve come to know. They need strong credentials. They need identity proofing. They need authentication and authorization, but with a twist: because now you’re talking about devices and not human beings. But they need to be trusted if we’re going to make mission decisions based on the data they are sending. We need to know that it accurate, and we need to be able to control what people can do with these devices that make changes in the physical world.

And so the predictions are, by people who make these kinds of predictions, that we’ll see 50 billion connected devices by 2020, which is gong to far outnumber the number of people for whom we need to manage identity. So, we need to be prepared – and prepare now – to manage the identities and the credentials and the access of these connected devices and things, and the relationships between the things and the people and the organizations. Because, again, the weakest link is what gets attacked, and when these things are on our networks, they need to be secured, or that’s the way the attacks are going to happen.