Page 10 – Radiant Logic | Unify, Observe, and Act on ALL Identity Data

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Introducing Radiant’s New Customer Community

March 17, 2022/in Blog Angeline O'Donnell/by Josue Ochoa

Radiant Logic’s Community Portal brings customers, partners, employees, and industry pundits together for an online experience of collaboration and growth. The community provides a centralized destination for finding support, advice, best practices, and feedback. Here’s a few suggested ways that you can stay engaged with our team and your peers:

Our ‘Tips and Tricks’ section is continuously updated with articles to help you get the most out of your RadiantOne deployment. We encourage you to share your creative solutions to challenges–our users love to hear from each other! Others may have different workarounds or alternative ways to solve the same problem.
Follow the ‘Announcements and Events’ section to stay up-to-date on all upcoming webinars, blog posts, and releases.
We want to know how to make your life easier! We encourage product feedback and funnel these requests directly to our product team. You’ll find a board for each RadiantOne module, and a place to share feedback or leave an idea. The more votes a request has, the more likely our product team will consider it for a future release. Our goal is to create features that benefit your organization directly.

Are you interested in a knowledge base article about a specific topic? Let us know in the miscellaneous feedback section. Remember to vote on what interests you!

You must be signed in to our support portal to engage in our community. If you don’t yet have access to our support portal, please email us at [email protected]. We look forward to seeing you there!

Radiant Profile: Meet Developer Catherine Meyer

March 15, 2022/in Blog Anne Garwood/by Josue Ochoa

We’re spending the entire month of March celebrating the women of Radiant, in honor of International Women’s Day. Today, we’re diving deep into the dev department to meet a young coder with big ideas.

Growing up in Colorado, Catherine Meyer wanted to be a veterinarian from as early as five years old. But now she’s a developer on Radiant Logic’s .NET team. So how did she make the shift from creatures to coding? Like everything in life, it was a process. (Here’s a hint: Python was involved, which feels like the perfect bridge between these disparate passions.) First, Catherine realized that veterinary medicine would require staying in school until she was at least thirty years old—and that “felt like a very long time before I could really get started with my life and career.”

Around the same time, Catherine started “messing around with a programming language called Python.” She was manipulating the RGB scale of images and “I thought that was really cool and since I was already on the fence about doing veterinary medicine, I realized computer science was what interested me now. So I went all in and changed my major.” Following that revelation, she transitioned her course-load to build her STEM skills. “It just made sense for me at the time, and I have no regrets about it, I loved it so.”

Go West, Young Coder

She was still in Denver then, but ended up transferring to Sonoma State in California, where she could complete her computer science degree within two years. Once there in the CS department, she worked part-time as a bank teller, then interned in the Sonoma County IT department. She ended up getting a BS in computer science, adding a minor in mathematics just for fun, explaining “I love numbers and math, so I had to.” (we love to see it, Catherine!)

Once she graduated, her friend at Radiant (hi, Nick!) told her about an opening at the company. “The opportunity came up and they were looking for a junior coder. So I submitted an application and the rest is history, I got the job.” Now she’s busy containerizing the engine of our Single Sign-On module (formerly/frequently known as “CFS” or “Cloud Federation Service”) to run in Docker containers.

Let’s Get Technical

While Catherine had focused on C++ and Python in school, she started out working in C# and the .Net ecosystem at Radiant, making our FTP server available in the cloud. She also modernized the RSA API we use within CFS and helped add OIDC and OAuth to CFS.

She realized what a difference her work could make when she learned that a huge federal customer relied heavily on something she’d had a major role in. “I was really excited to hear that the RSA API I revamped is being used every single day and that it’s really mission-critical.” Catherine’s also excited that another project she had a hand in, Radiant’s Azure AD toolkit, will be available in customer environments. “It’s very empowering to know that things I build are used in important deployments every day.”

A Young Woman in Tech

Catherine is a big proponent of more women getting into tech—or at least learning to code. “Those skills are necessary for any field, being able to use a command line and knowing how to traverse a directory and a file system is just super important for anyone, technical or not.”

She even challenged me to learn Python, her gateway coding language, explaining that “I hype on Python so much because it’s actually a really simple language to understand. You’re writing what we call ‘pseudo code,’ so it’s basically English and an easy entry point for people learning computer science concepts. In fact, that’s exactly how I learned.”

According to Catherine, learning a programming language makes it easier to understand the underlying concepts behind coding. “Once you learn how to write a for-loop, you know how a for-loop works and you just have to learn the syntax of how the programming language wants it, and from there it’s pretty easy to make that transition.”

Advice for the Code-Curious

Talking about the importance of women starting a career in the tech industry or taking on more technical roles across different industries, Catherine identifies a feeling that many of us struggle with when we’re learning new things or playing new roles: that sense of not being worthy that results from not feeling fully capable or accepted.

“Asking questions is part of learning, but I struggled with that a lot when I first started. I had major imposter syndrome and I was really afraid to ask questions. But it was actually kind of frustrating to some people that I wasn’t asking questions,” she explains, adding “don’t be afraid, there’s no such thing as a stupid question, especially when you’re in the early stages of learning.”

A Culture of Collaboration

According to Catherine, the Radiant dev team operates as an “open forum where we want to know what other people are thinking, so we can find the best possible solutions for our customers. We have a very active Slack channel where we offer different suggestions. That’s what really makes our team so strong: the willingness to help and collaborate. Just having a second pair of eyes or a different opinion is really helpful.”

While Radiant Logic has undergone a major transition away from being a founder-led organization, our dev team remains laser-focused on writing great code and adding powerful capabilities. As Catherine says, “our VP of engineering gives us the space to do the work, helping with roadblocks but never micromanaging. And our new Chief Product Officer has a strong sense of the industry and is bringing that to the dev team—he’s very innovative.”

The Maker Mindset

One thing Catherine said during our conversation really stuck with me—I hope this gives you the fire to build something new, whether that’s a computer program, a piece of sculpture, or a garden path.

“Be curious and don’t be afraid to fail. It doesn’t matter if you break something. Take it as an opportunity to learn.”

Radiant Profile: Meet Lisa Grady

March 8, 2022/in Blog Anne Garwood/by Josue Ochoa

Happy International Women’s Day! We’re showcasing some of the women of Radiant all month long and I can’t think of a better person to highlight today. Lisa Grady has been a key player at Radiant Logic for half her life—and much of the company’s existence. She started the same year the Identity and Access Management tech stack was launched, so she’s seen this industry grow and evolve from the beginning of the IAM era. The year will sound familiar for another technology-driven reason—it was Y2K and no one was quite sure what would happen when all the clocks clicked over from 1999 to the year 2000.

Lisa has played many roles over the years. She was hired as the start-up’s only Systems Engineer, but “Back then, we were a very small team and I answered to whatever title was needed to fit the narrative. I was the Product Evangelist when I was doing webinars. On calls, I could be anything from the Product Manager to a Systems Engineer, or even a Senior Solutions Architect on the sales side.” These days, her job is still huge and covers a lot of essential ground, but she’s now a Product Manager, where she’s focused on product and strategy, helping lead the future evolution of our Identity Data Fabric and the Intelligent Identity Data Platform that makes it possible.

How She Got Here

As a business major in college, Lisa had to select an area of emphasis. Something about Management Information Systems (MIS) sparked her curiosity and sent her down the technical path she’s still on—one that has wound its way through all the modern innovations of IAM, from its beginnings in 2000, through the 2010 introduction of blockchain and the Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) cloud, right up to today’s world of multi-cloud deployments, Zero Trust architectures, and the rise of identity fabric and cybersecurity mesh (both of which rely on the unified identity data foundation only Radiant provides).

The world has changed in many ways since then. As she explains, “Tech is more welcoming for women now. Back when I started, it felt like I was the only one.” But Lisa’s quick to point out that she hasn’t experienced the same discrimination as other women trying to break into tech. “Maybe it’s where I live in Northern California. And maybe it’s because we were a start-up back then,” she says. “There weren’t many rules or procedures in the early days. We were basically all in the same boat together. Our founders were both French and they were open to women. As tech-minded folks, I think they saw something in me. They appreciated my quickness, my technical acumen. I was a valuable asset to them and worked hard to stay that way.”

The Start-Up Spirit: Growing Up with Radiant

In the early days, there were only a handful of people working at the corporate headquarters in Novato. “I shared a small office with a developer and Claude Samuelson, the VP of Engineering, who was also a co-founder. That’s where I began my Radiant career.”

The year after she started, the world experienced huge ruptures, with the crash of the tech industry and the 9/11 terrorist attacks putting the importance of cybersecurity front and center. The next year was a testing time for the small start-up. “How do you navigate having to lay off all but ten people?” Lisa says. “We had to go bare-bones. It was very tough and we all lived very lean until we could get back to full strength.”

Growing the Business, One Meeting at a Time

Start-ups are often a scramble, full of lean years and heroic efforts. Lisa shares the story of Dieter Schuller—now the Chief Revenue Officer—getting them a meeting with a bank in Indianapolis at a critical moment when they really needed to land a customer just to keep the lights on. She and founder and former CEO Michel Prompt flew to Chicago to meet up with Dieter and by the time they arrived, the last flight out to Indianapolis had been canceled.

“Dieter insisted on driving us, so there I am with these two guys, trying to catch a little sleep in the back, while we drove through the night to our hotel in Indianapolis. We arrived around 2 AM and while I certainly didn’t get much sleep, we made our meeting and the bank became a customer. And that saved us, really. We were so slim on resources during that time, but I knew I couldn’t leave then. The company needed me and I couldn’t leave them in a lurch.”

Just Like Family

All these hardships forged stronger bonds within the small, scrappy team. And Lisa kept blazing a trail through the growing organization, taking on tech support roles, product training, recruiting, strategy and positioning—you name it, she’s probably done it somewhere along the way. Her deep connection to her coworkers remains today, 22 years later. As Lisa says, “when you’re working with family, you never want to let them down.”

When it comes to Lisa, that sense of loyalty is shared by her team. Prashanth Godey, Radiant’s Director of Systems Engineers, has worked with Lisa for more than 20 years and says “she is, without a doubt, one of the biggest professional assets to this company. We’ve faced a number of challenges and overcome many obstacles together, but she always has the drive to keep going. I really appreciate the way she takes on challenges with such a positive attitude.”

What’s Ahead for Radiant 2.0

You may have noticed some changes around the joint, starting with our brand-new website and the blog you’re currently reading. It’s been an exciting shift. As Lisa explains, “We were founder-led for more than two decades, so it’s a big change. Radiant was their baby, their dream, their vision. It’s a very different relationship with the new management team. They don’t have the same connection or need for control and they’re ready to move in new directions and take advantage of new opportunities.”

And with Lisa helping drive product direction, I know we’re in good hands…after all, as a customer once said of Lisa, she is “extremely intelligent, resourceful, with a tremendous attention to detail…a consummate professional in every sense of the word. I wish she worked at my company.” At Radiant Logic, we know we’re lucky she works at ours.

PS: We’re celebrating the badass women of Radiant all month, so check back next week to hear how a young Radiant developer got her start—and inspired me to learn how to code!

Radiant Profile: Meet CMO Deb McGinn

March 1, 2022/in Blog Anne Garwood/by Josue Ochoa

It’s the first of March and International Women’s Day is almost here. But after a seismic year of success and successions, one day is not enough to properly celebrate the badass women of Team Radiant. So we’re going to take this entire month to shine a light on some of the key players who put the radiant in our logic. And I can’t think of a better way to start this party than by highlighting our very own CMO, who’s laser-focused on how to tell the Radiant story so prospects and customers can see our value and tap into it to drive security and success.

Starting in the Consumer Space

Deb McGinn got her big break at Johnson & Johnson, rounding out her b-school education with a stint as brand manager for band-aids and other household products that are probably on your bathroom shelf right now. She moved to Callaway Golf after that (and her time there was well spent, because I’ve never seen a person so thoroughly dominate a TopGolf Swing Suite like Deb did during our Sales Kick-Off last summer—she’s a shark, y’all!). But Deb wanted more: “When the great recession of 2007-2009 greatly impacted the golf market, I was able to step back and strategically think about my next career move. I wanted to keep my marketing skills relevant with the changing world—and technology was the answer.”

With her consumer background, Deb researched like-minded tech firms in the Bay Area, narrowing in on Norton, the “antivirus” company owned by Symantec. “Luckily for me, they were trying to pivot from traditional tech marketing of ‘speeds and feeds’ to a more consumer-focused approach, and they were looking for CPG (consumer packaged goods) marketing expertise to help drive this transformation. I found a great role in Product Marketing for Norton Antivirus and Norton Internet Security, so my career in high tech and cybersecurity began.”

When Deb started, Norton Antivirus was still distributed on CDs through brick-and-mortar retail stores, but Norton was already a $2 Billion a year global business—and 80% of the revenue came through eCommerce channels. She got a crash course in digital marketing and helped launch the Mobile Security category and business for Norton, moving into global mobile-first markets like Japan, as well as new channels such as mobile app stores, and even landing in the #1 spot in the Apple App Store a week post-launch.

The Work/Life Balancing Act

When Arxan Technologies found her in 2017, she was eager for a career change: “I felt really stuck in my role and really wanted to take on a much larger role within marketing beyond my product marketing expertise.” But at five months pregnant with her first child, she faced a familiar conundrum for working women. Changing jobs at that point in her pregnancy meant an extensive executive interview process, then starting a new role at seven months pregnant. That would give her just two months—if all went according to schedule!—to ramp up and prove herself before going out on the maternity leave she had negotiated into her contract. And all this while balancing a massive new role leading global marketing for a 110-person company and figuring out how to be a first-time parent and mother. (No pressure…)

But Deb is a driven person, so she went for it and found success: “Arxan turned out to be such a fantastic experience and environment because I was able to come in and lay the foundation for marketing, go out on leave and be with my daughter and husband as we figured out this new family life, and then I came back to work and had an incredible few years building a modern, cutting-edge marketing organization that supported our business growth objectives and was truly measurable in terms of our impact.” Arxan is also where she discovered that she loved working with smaller teams. “I loved being able to work strategically on the business goals and long-term vision, but get my hands dirty with the team on key projects and not lose my edge when it comes to messaging and creative execution.”

When Arxan was acquired and merged with four other companies to create a 700+ person organization, Deb “lost the connection with the business and the team, where I really love to operate as a CMO. When Joe Sander, my former CEO from Arxan, became the CEO of Radiant and I learned more about the business, the market opportunity, and the company culture, I knew this would be a great place to work—and a great fit for me to help unleash the potential of this organization.”

Small Team, Massive Opportunity

After more than twenty years in business, Radiant Logic was well established, having undergone massive growth over the past few years within a fast-moving market, where identity was becoming an increasingly crucial driver of key organizational initiatives. For Deb and the rest of the incoming management team, the great need for an authoritative source of identity data to drive authentication and access was crystal clear.

“Radiant was an easy decision for me to make. Throughout my career I have worked for large multinational conglomerates and organizations where I feel like I am a ‘cog in a wheel,’ instead of a serious contributor to the business.” So Radiant’s small size and huge potential was an appealing combination for a woman who describes herself as “very competitive by nature,” saying “while I don’t seek out the limelight, I want to be able to make a difference, and see the impact of my contributions to an organization.” Because the Radiant website hadn’t been updated in a decade, that became an immediate opportunity to have a real impact on the company.

“A primary thesis behind the business transformation was that if we got the positioning and messaging right and created a world-class website to make it easier to understand what Radiant does and the value we provide, we should be off to the races. Challenge accepted!”

At Radiant, Culture Matters

As Deb discovered doing her due diligence on Radiant Logic and its team, “the common theme is that the people are really smart and they have been with the company forever (at least in modern tech time). Having been here for 9+ months now, I can honestly say that the most incredible thing about Radiant is that there is very little ego within the organization—and I really think that makes all the difference. Employees have so much respect for each other. They appreciate that their colleagues are smart and talented, and probably have a slightly different skill set so they don’t have to worry about direct “competition” for roles.”

This isn’t just about having a collegial culture: “Everyone also has respect for the product and the technology. I have never once heard anybody talking negatively about what we sell or provide to our customers. And people are PROUD of how we support our customers because they care deeply about those relationships, and they are acutely aware not to “oversell” our services or solutions because they would rather under-promise and over-deliver than disappoint a customer. As part of the new executive team, this is something that we are trying really hard not to break—and when we do bring in outside talent to help support our growth objectives, we are highly conscious of the Radiant culture and only want to build upon the great employee foundation that we inherited.”

Setting Up Radiant for Ongoing Success

When Deb first joined Radiant, her immediate goal was to understand the market and the technology, while positioning our solution so everyone could immediately understand its value. This was no small feat, because “while evolving the messaging and positioning, we also had to build and implement a modern marketing infrastructure to underpin our lead generation and engagement strategy. And finally, we had to evolve the brand and website to reflect how cutting-edge Radiant’s platform really is. We were able to achieve all of this in six months, which is a really incredible accomplishment.”

According to Deb, “it has been so rewarding to watch each person step up and take on new responsibilities and new challenges, oftentimes way outside their comfort zone, in order to help us with the transformation we have undergone.” Now that the foundation is built, her team is focused on getting the word out about Radiant, driving thought leadership and awareness, generating high quality leads for the sales team, and showcasing how we help customers solve significant business challenges.

That sense of mission extends all the way into the leadership team and beyond. As Deb explains, “from my colleagues in the c-suite to our board members and our extended leadership team, looking around the room (or zoom windows), we go from strength to strength in every role. There are no egos in the room, nobody trying to talk just to hear their voice, or to shout just to be the loudest person in the room. There is a sense of real collaboration, and that we are in this together, as a team, to take an organization with great talent and technology and let the world see how much of an impact we can make.”

Expect More Innovations

As she says, “With such great technology, talent, and drive—the opportunities are really endless. I am excited to be able to play a role in our company vision and where we want to play to win in the market. I am excited at the creative expression of our brand and bringing Radiant to life with new programs, technology, and my awesome team. I am excited to work with our BDR, Sales, and Partner teams to tell the Radiant story and demonstrate to prospects and customers how we can truly help organizations overcome identity sprawl and turn identity into a business driver.”

As far as what’s next, she says to expect major innovations. While she can’t discuss too much publicly, she did share that “we have tapped into some core insights around our technology and market needs which I think will be truly game-changing for organizations. Know this: the future’s so bright, you gotta wear shades.”

Get to Know the Women of Radiant All Month Long

According to Deb, “I’ve worked with a lot of amazing women in my career…but coming to Radiant, I’ve been so impressed with how many women are in highly technical roles—from Product to Solutions Architects, Systems Integrators, Sales, Implementation, Support and Services, Customer Success, and of course, Marketing. The women of Radiant have helped shape the company and the culture, and they deserve to be celebrated every day—not just during Women’s Month.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself! Next up, we’ll be profiling Lisa Grady, who’s been with Radiant Logic for 22 years. Yes, TWENTY TWO. To say she’s a shining star in the Radiant constellation does not adequately capture the depth, breadth, and heart she brings to our team, our company, and our customers.

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What’s Inside RadiantOne Version 7.4

February 28, 2022/in Blog Lisa Grady/by Josue Ochoa

Hey everyone–we’re excited to finally release RadiantOne 7.4 into the wild. This is a point release for us, so you may not notice a lot of major updates on the front end, but we’ve been doing some important finetuning behind the scenes to make the product more user-friendly, more interoperable, and easier to deploy.

Here are a few of the updates you’ll find in the 7.4 release. We don’t just care about your end users’ experience–your team’s efforts and wishlist are important to us too! Each of these updates were made thanks to direct customer feedback (always appreciated):

We’ve modernized our sync module to scale better and to handle the needs of a hybrid IAM environment (including both on-prem and cloud apps) and cloud migration initiatives. This includes a complete revamp of our sync architecture, and replacing Glassfish and OpenMQ, so it’s easier to sync and provision identities straight out of the box.
We’ve improved our ability to provision and integrate with cloud and SaaS applications. We’re now a fully-compliant SCIMv2 service, and we can better provision to other SCIMv2 endpoints.
We’ve made RadiantOne easier to use and configure from one universal interface: the Control Panel. This means one web-based interface for admins to use for all configuration, so you can drive from just one spot.
We now support modern deployment scenarios on Kubernetes to help our customers manage their deployments in a more reliable, scalable, and consistent way. This container-based approach allows the product to be deployed consistently with as little manual config as possible. It also lets us take advantage of the highly available, self-healing, and load balancing features of Kubernetes.

If you’d like to learn more, check out this video for an overview of some of these key features.

Besides the product updates, we’re debuting the Radiant Resident Engineer (RRE) program (something many of you have been asking about for a while). We know it can be hard to find the technical expertise you need to get your project off the ground. The Radiant Logic Resident Engineer (RRE) is designed to provide a RadiantOne-certified consulting resource to assist in the implementation or administration of RadiantOne for a six-month period. You too can have your own Radiant expert!

We’d love to talk to you more about RadiantOne 7.4–let us know what you like, anything you wish was different, and what you’d love to see in our next release. If you’d like to request a trial, please do it here and someone from our team will help you take the product for a test drive.

You can also check out our revamped website to keep up with our latest news, get the latest identity insights on our blog, and sign up to commiserate–I mean network–with other IAM professionals about the challenges in identity today at a user group.

A huge THANK YOU for your ongoing support of Radiant. We love to innovate based on customer feedback, so please keep it coming!

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Your Fabric Needs a Fabric

February 24, 2022/in Blog The Radiant Team/by Josue Ochoa

Business leaders face increasingly complex identity and access management (IAM) challenges as they deal with more remote workers and demanding customer-facing interactions. IT leaders recognize the importance of IAM both for security and the business, and are investing more in it. Nearly 70% of global business executives surveyed here said they’d increase IAM spending this year.

Yet, the high cost of deploying an IAM solution enterprise-wide can cause even the most free-spending business leader to hesitate at the expense. They must be sure they can recoup their return on investment (ROI) across the organization if they’re to invest the millions it will cost. Identity-related projects are essential, but organizations may hesitate to invest in them unless the chosen solution can do double or triple duty.

Let’s take a closer look at how an identity fabric can make a difference for advanced projects in any complex organization. Then we’ll discuss why an Identity Data Fabric is the unified identity data foundation that helps your identity fabric soar.

What is an identity fabric and why does it need an always-updated source of unified identity data?

The term “identity fabric” describes an identity management framework that delivers the capabilities needed for seamless and controlled user access to every service. It’s not a single tool, technology, or cloud application. Instead, it’s an approach for architecting IAM within enterprises. Organizations using this approach often combine a set of tools and services to deliver the major architectures they need to stay secure and competitive in a fast-moving environment.

But delivering an identity fabric securely within complex infrastructures built over years of diverse investments is easier said than done. Just like any identity-reliant initiative, you need a unified (and infinitely agile!) source of identity data to secure and enable your identity fabric, since each element that’s woven into your fabric has its own disparate data stores and parsing through that alphabet soup of protocols can be an expensive, timeline-cratering task that isn’t nearly as flexible and future-proof as the “fabric” framework promises.

The best way to make your identity fabric far faster and easier to deliver is another fabric-driven approach, the Identity Data Fabric. This powerful identity data unification layer supports your overall identity fabric by delivering the precise views of identity data needed for all the different elements to perform their individual functions, while working in concert with each other. If the identity fabric is the front of your quilt, the Identity Data Fabric is the back and it’s essential for keeping everything together.

By connecting all the identity and attributes from your company’s access management solutions, customer relationship management (CRM) tools, databases, Active Directory and LDAP directories, and HR platforms, your security can be driven by all you know about each and every user—and those crucial attributes can be leveraged immediately by any application or infrastructure that requires an always up-to-date source of customized identity data.

As a foundational fabric approach, the Identity Data Fabric gives organizations more flexibility in using identity data across solutions and tools. It lowers the cost of any new initiative by seamlessly unifying identity information without having to invest in lengthy, expensive, and brittle integration projects. New initiatives can be rolled out faster and more efficiently (think days or weeks, instead of months or years), plus you’ll get much more insight into your data, while increasing the return on investment for identity-reliant initiatives, including your overarching identity fabric.

The RadiantOne Platform uses an Identity Data Fabric approach to unify identity and make it usable by any application that needs it. While it’s often used with IAM and customer IAM (CIAM) services, it can also be connected to other services, solutions, data sources, and tools to deliver a robust feature set that crosses every identity-driven organizational priority.

How identity management challenges impact project roll-outs

The complex nature of today’s IT landscape makes it challenging to implement new projects and evolve the infrastructure. In fact, the true complexities may only be known by your IT teams. There’s the data stored on-prem, in the cloud, and in hybrid cloud environments, plus any tools or applications the IT team doesn’t know about—sometimes resulting from so-called “Shadow IT.” Anyone outside that workgroup may not understand just how difficult it is to scale identity data for new projects—and the true costs of trying.

The current state of identity sprawl can multiply costs exponentially as teams spend more time and money on identity than they realized would be necessary up front. They bring in more expensive, highly specialized team members to work on coding customized connections to identity data sources when they could be working on tasks that drive more value for the project.

An Identity Data Fabric approach speeds up the identity phase of any project, making it more efficient and cost-effective. It could even open opportunities to add newer technologies or solutions your organization might not have considered (or thought possible!) in the past.

The benefits of an Identity Data Fabric for advanced projects

There are various benefits to using an Identity Data Fabric approach to any advanced projects your organization may be considering, such as:

Introducing a modern identity management concept to your organization. The traditional corporate paradigm that defined identity data as being “inside” or “outside” the organization no longer applies in today’s hybrid era. In the fabric, identity data simply “exists” and is stored across multiple protocols, wherever that data currently resides, in a mixture of on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments.
Eliminating the need to manually manage identity sources. Many IT teams still manage identity data much too manually, either because they’ve not updated their processes to use automation or because their legacy systems don’t allow it. This manual work places an undue burden on them that only multiplies with each data source and size of the organization. An Identity Data Fabric reduces their workloads by helping IT teams search, monitor, and manage identity more effectively through built-in automated capabilities. Advanced projects can be planned and executed on shorter timelines because identity data is much simpler to manage and access.
Expanding the scope of identity data use into previously-unexplored areas. Some organizations have delayed projects like single sign-on (SSO) because their technology stacks wouldn’t allow them to integrate identity data the way they needed. Many IAM products and solutions require external staff to deploy, putting them at the mercy of the third-party’s schedule and ability. The way an Identity Data Fabric approach unifies data and reduces the regular maintenance tasks opens the possibility of these new, advanced projects. The data is more accessible to all systems and tools, so business leaders can seriously consider the advanced projects they previously looked at as “nice-to-haves, but not right now.”
Reducing the time and effort spent on the identity management part of any project. The standard case of identity sprawl for any organization today makes it nearly impossible to scale identity management to the level advanced projects need. There’s too much data, and it’s too spread out. Using an identity data management platform with a fabric approach like RadiantOne Platform means configuring identity data connections once and then allowing the platform to automatically feed, monitor, and update the data. With a few clicks, the platform can be set up to deliver identity data to the new project much faster than the traditional approach—and that data is up-to-the-second current, so your security is always based on the very latest information.
Freeing expensive IT staff to deliver more value to the project. IT professionals are often highly specialized in their domain and cost the organization a lot to hire and retain. Yet, many cannot do the work they were hired to do because of the demands of fragmentation and identity sprawl. They spend their time working on lower-value identity tasks because that’s what the project needs instead of driving high-value work that could improve the organization, its products, and its workflows. An Identity Data Fabric frees these expensive experts to work on their specialties because the identity data work is largely automated by the Identity Data Fabric.
Improving identity data capabilities to the entire organization. IAM data is typically the domain of the IT and cybersecurity teams. It’s isolated from other departments and rarely offered as an organizational resource because it requires too much customization. Non-IT team requests for data are often deprioritized because of the amount of work needed to give them access. However, with an Identity Data Fabric, the data can be made available to any team, application, tool, or workflow that would benefit from it. Connecting the data sources to the additional systems can be done quickly, so the downstream teams or services get access right away.

An Identity Data Fabric is an innovative approach that can help organizations bring a more modern perspective to their workflows without making wholesale changes to their infrastructure. It allows you to use existing identity data sources no matter where or how they’re stored and still enjoy the benefits of newer identity technologies.

Such an approach also increases the ROI of any identity-related solutions by making the data easier and faster to access. Previously-manual work that took too much time to complete can now be done more efficiently and support more advanced projects and initiatives. An Identity Data Fabric is a flexible and efficient way to connect identity data to more teams and help them achieve initiatives they couldn’t afford to look at before. Learn how to build the case for your Identity Data Fabric.

If you’re looking to expand identity-related projects in your organization and give everyone access to the right identity data for the right use, reach out to us today. We’re here to help you build an identity data foundation for your organization and unleash the power of your identity data.

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Identity Sprawl Is Holding Your Company Back

February 17, 2022/in Blog The Radiant Team/by Josue Ochoa

The identity data your organization has collected across a diverse array of stores and protocols contains rich context that could drive new insights and new initiatives. But the way these disparate stores have been managed to date is not optimal, and it’s holding your company back from leveraging all this rich data to full effect. Even worse, disconnected identity sources cost companies money in unnecessary overhead and introduce cybersecurity risks.

Companies store identity data in multiple forms and locations for many reasons. There’s the data stored in operations spread across multiple geographies. There’s the identity data stored in legacy applications and the mix of on-prem and cloud architectures many companies have today. Further complicating things are all the corporate acquisitions and mergers that happen.

Welcome to identity sprawl. This modern affliction makes it hard for companies to manage all the identities of their customers, employees, and other key stakeholders. It increases the time, effort, and financial cost of identity management for any modern company. Many companies just give up trying to tame identity sprawl and resign themselves to it being a costly, time-consuming mess.

Let’s look at how identity sprawl happens, what it costs companies today, and look at a solution that could help.

What Is Identity Sprawl?

Identity sprawl happens when multiple isolated systems and directories manage a user’s identity. Each siloed system stores the identity information it needs to determine access—along with tons of other key data—synchronizing for each user across every system they have an account in.

It usually happens through a combination of factors, including:

Applications or systems that are not or cannot be integrated with a company’s central directory service.
A workforce spread out across geographies, whether that’s across town or around the world.
Companies using a mix of on-prem and cloud enterprise architecture to power their tech stack.

Identity sprawl is spreading fast in today’s companies, as 76% of them use more than one identity directory in their cloud environments alone. As identity sprawl continues, companies will be hard-pressed to mitigate the risks and challenges going forward.

How Does Identity Sprawl Affect Companies?

The main challenge with identity sprawl is that it prevents or complicates a company’s control of and visibility into its own identity data. As these companies added cloud services and other SaaS apps to their workflows, employees started authenticating themselves against datastores hosted by external parties. For example, employees might use their social media accounts to log in to the new SaaS app, which is not visible to or controlled by their employer.

The carefully designed cybersecurity strategies and postures put in place by companies are circumvented by these non-corporate identity systems. It’s much more challenging to monitor, manage, and secure this identity information—or even be aware it exists! Companies can no longer rely on their firewalls, network and endpoint security, and intrusion prevention systems to secure this identity data because it lives beyond their boundaries. They must rely on third parties and cloud providers to safely authenticate and secure identity data without controlling how these third-party companies do that.

These external technologies spread identity data across a much broader area and make securing and protecting access to company data increasingly more difficult.

The Costs of Identity Sprawl

But what are the costs to identity sprawl for today’s companies? Is it really that bad to have this data spread across many different systems, some of which are outside the official corporate network?

In a word, yes. Identity sprawl puts your company at reputational and financial risk if unknown or unverified users and devices access your data.

It risks your intellectual property

Criminals could use stolen credentials from a third-party authenticator (such as a social media platform) and access your intellectual property. They could also use that access as an entry point to your company network and wreak untold havoc once inside.

It increases cybersecurity risks

With so many identity stores and diverse services using them, it increases the likelihood that users will reuse their passwords across services. This practice leaves your company vulnerable to credential spying and theft while undermining your IT security efforts trying to focus on best practices.

One security best practice that’s often compromised by identity sprawl is the use of privileged user accounts. These user accounts give higher-level access to applications, systems, and data, and if they’re not monitored and regulated by IT teams, they can be easily abused. Privileged user accounts are of particular interest to criminals as they’re used as gateways into systems and resources. The SolarWinds attack is a good example of the cost of identity sprawl and the particular dangers of privileged accounts. Criminals harvested system and web browser credentials from privileged users to infiltrate the SolarWinds network and then attack from there.

It’s expensive to maintain

Managing multiple identity directories is expensive for companies as they’ve got to deal with the infrastructure, services, and resources needed to monitor and maintain them. Depending on the number of identity stores that exist, that could be a large line item on an IT budget.

How can companies reduce their exposure to identity sprawl with so many vulnerabilities? Is there a solution or security posture that can help today’s companies deal with their existing infrastructure, whether it’s on-prem, in the cloud, or a hybrid of the two?

Solutions to Identity Sprawl

Proactive IT professionals and business leaders who want to take control of their identity sprawl without making wholesale changes have a few options they can try. They won’t completely solve the issue but can mitigate it to reduce risk and make it more manageable for your IT teams.

Replacing legacy applications and services: This offers you the ability to replace outdated technology and increase protections to identity data.

Revoking third-party authentication options: Requiring employees to create unique company-based identities for their SaaS and cloud-based services removes some of the risks of these data stores since they must remain outside your company network.

Deploying an identity management (IdM) tool: These tools can help with the identity provisioning process and make identity management more efficient. These options can partially solve the identity sprawl problem for companies today, but they don’t go far enough.

Take a different approach to solving identity sprawl

A better approach companies can try is a unification platform built on an Identity Data Fabric framework, like the RadiantOne Intelligent Identity Data platform. The platform unifies identity across all the different places (and diverse ways!) identity data is stored and gives your company a logical way to use, manage, and secure it. The fabric framework allows you to contextualize identity data no matter where it’s located and then makes it available to whatever application or system that needs it. You can leave the data where it is and retain its value to the organization while gaining all the control, security, and visibility into the data that you’ve been missing.

5 ways an Identity Data Fabric overcomes identity sprawl

This powerful unification layer helps companies identify all known services and applications while mapping them to identity stores. You could use this to plan future data consolidation projects, assess application needs, and identify IT process gaps.
It provides context-rich information about the identities, offering visibility into your identity data that you didn’t have before.
It can be used to establish more granular controls of identity data and usage, ensuring precise access rights for users and reducing the threat risk of identity data being stolen.
It can be implemented in weeks instead of months or years so that companies can enjoy stronger security and faster ROI.
It connects to all types of underlying data stores and systems, so you can continue to use your existing infrastructure. Plus, it scales efficiently as your company grows, so you won’t need to replace it with something new in the future.

Final thought

Growing companies will inevitably end up with a jumble of diverse identity data stores. Each new acquisition or cloud service you add to your tech stack adds another node to your identity map. What started as a single identity directory that powered your internal applications has turned into a spider web of interconnected systems and disparate data stores. Employees are frustrated because they have too many accounts and passwords to manage. IT pros are scared of the multiplying risk each data store brings. Company leaders are frustrated with the mounting costs of storing and managing all that identity data.

Instead of blowing up your identity infrastructure and starting from scratch, consider moving to an identity unification approach that allows you to manage even the most complex infrastructures logically and flexibly, while adding speed and increasing agility. Radiant Logic’s powerful platform is based on a unified Identity Data Fabric framework that modernizes identity management for today’s companies. It uses what you already have to give you all the control, security, and visibility you’ve been missing. Learn more and get started on your Radiant journey.

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These One Zillion Things Drive Us Nuts About IAM

February 9, 2022/in Blog Lauren Selby/by Josue Ochoa

Reading through Brian Iverson’s excellent blog post on what drives him up the wall about Identity & Access Management (IAM), I thought wow, only two things? And also, wow, I’m not sure I ever heard someone say they love IAM before? That’s awesome! What a positive outlook!

In the IAM world, we really are all on the same team, working towards the same goals—securing access efficiently, creating better digital experiences for end users (aren’t we all end users somewhere?), and maintaining our boundaries in an increasingly perimeter-free digital world.

An identity fabric architecture weaves the ecosystem together to make these goals materialize. The role an Identity Data Fabric specifically plays is bringing the data together—to satisfy the rest of the fabric’s insatiable need for information. This can include anything from user identifier and credentials, groups, and roles, to when you last logged in to such and such application… whatever is relevant to that platform in that moment, and delivered in the way required. This is the basis for identity-first security approaches like Zero Trust Architecture, which require complete and accurate information about users.

What “rest of the fabric”? Brian mentions a three- or four-part framework in his post, and that aligns with what we are seeing from our customers in the wild as well. What we often see making up this framework is: identity (lifecycle) management, identity (account) administration, access management (authentication, authorization, Single Sign On), and governance.

Identity Complaints A-Z

Within the organization, each of these categories is often handled by multiple products, from different vendors, and managed by different teams. What unites them? Well, first of all these solutions should work together (they don’t), and second they all rely on access to identity data.

The identity data is lurking on a deeper layer, underneath these different consuming solutions. And it is a mess. Did you forget about the data??? Well, don’t. Because it’s a hugely underestimated element when it comes to efficiently and securely managing identity. Sneaky sneaky.

Even sneakier, all these fabric elements are very persnickety when it comes to how they want the data delivered. They want to see it in their language, protocol, and format, and they want it in one location—but there isn’t a large organization in the world that has all that together. Well, unless they’ve deployed RadiantOne. 😉 In which case, they’ve built the basis for composability, allowing identity services to stitch together seamlessly to form a killer IAM tech stack.

Identity sprawl is a real pain. It’s the unforeseen roadblock when you’re trying to deploy an SSO solution, it’s the lack of visibility that creates gaps in your security posture, it’s what’s keeping your customers from having a sensical online interaction with your company… it’s what goes bump in the night (if you’re an IAM architect). You can’t address identity sprawl through integration, orchestration, and a bunch of connectors, because these methods operate at the application layer—key elements of the overall identity fabric definitely, but they don’t optimize the management of identity data itself, which underpins all of these other processes. If you don’t get identity (data) right, nothing else can work right.

Don’t worry… we serve up identity data on a silver platter

We couldn’t agree more that identity needs to be “at the center of managing access across disparate systems.” From there, everything starts to make sense. But hey, getting there is not exactly a walk in the park for organizations dealing with complexity, technical debt, identity silos, and what have you. Again, this is unless you have RadiantOne, in which case you can solve these problems within weeks or months.

Once you get identity (data) where it belongs, at the center, the payoff happens at multiple levels; administration, enforcement, governance… these become at once simpler, more robust, and more effective.

Connecting the Identity and Access in IAM starts with unified identity data. That’s the foundation for enabling the identity fabric and cybersecurity mesh– in other words, getting platforms to play nice together so you can focus on more important stuff. If you hate silos as much as we do, give us a call, book a demo, whatever feels right, and we’ll help you untangle identity so you can get back to business, baby!

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Big News From DC: The Cybersecurity Mandate and Zero Trust Strategy Memo

February 2, 2022/in Blog The Radiant Team/by Josue Ochoa

It’s been a huge time for federal agencies and the technology providers who help them stay secure. The one-two punch of the President’s recent Cybersecurity Mandate, followed by last week’s major Zero Trust Strategy announcement, puts real teeth into the federal government’s effort to boost security in a time of ever-rising risk. The recent mandate extended last May’s Cybersecurity EO to the Department of Defense and the intelligence community, two very tempting targets for global bad guys. The Zero Trust Architecture component is a blueprint for real, meaningful action, and it’s one that comes with mandatory action timelines because the Office of Management and Budget does. not. play.

At Radiant, we’re happy to see the federal government—home to some of the world’s most complex and essential identity and cybersecurity environments—taking such a leadership role on data and network security. As a key contributor to the NIST NCCoE effort to define Zero Trust Architectures, the Radiant team is proud to help deliver on these overarching security goals, providing the unified identity data foundation that drives the Zero Trust strategy model and attribute-based access control. (Our mantra: Dial in your identity data first, so everything you do gets much easier…)

The Global Security Landscape: It’s Not Great

Whether it’s geopolitical brinksmanship or rogue actors with chaos in mind, the stakes are sky high these days. Digital vulnerabilities can disrupt global networks and derail massive economies. While private actors are driven by many motives—money, politics, general turmoil—state-run cyberattacks are basically a way of waging war without the shooting. This new security framework, underpinned by a “least privilege” Zero Trust mindset, puts the United States on stronger footing, giving government cybersecurity teams a path forward to modernize and optimize the critical technology infrastructure that ensures our national security and safeguards our personal identity data as citizens.

Strengthening our cybersecurity defenses has massive economic and national security implications. The order includes an array of actions designed to confront the dangers of cyber attacks as they increase in frequency and sophistication. These frameworks will also become a model for the private companies that haven’t jumped into the Zero Trust waters yet, since multinational companies face many of the same risks—massive scale, asset-rich, high-profile targets—as the federal government.

Where Radiant Logic Comes In…

We’ll have more posts on the Cybersecurity Framework and Zero Trust Strategy from key contributors across the organization, but here are some elements that stood out. The newly dropped strategy calls for centralizing IAM and the data that enables it, integrating all agency applications for centralized authentication and authorization, and tapping user attribute sources to support ABAC/RBAC. These are all great goals—and delivering the unified identity data needed to drive them is right in the Radiant wheelhouse.

As we’ve learned over many years of implementations in the public and private sectors, making key imperatives happen within massive identity infrastructures that have grown over many years across successive (often incompatible) innovations is a major challenge. Just gathering the diverse and far-flung attributes you need to centralize IAM and agency applications and deliver on the promise of ABAC is no mean feat. And achieving a 360-degree view of all users, as well as complete and always up-to-date global profiles for every user, is essential to ensuring security and enabling the latest innovations.

In fact, the success of new security frameworks such as Zero Trust (as well as identity fabrics and cybersecurity mesh, for those of you thinking about other innovative investments) relies entirely on accurate and accessible information about the people, objects, and devices that interact with its networks. And it’s the quality, the granularity, and the availability of that information that determines the security—or vulnerability—of each organization. But delivering the needed attributes across fragmented infrastructures, while taking full advantage of all the richness your identity data has to offer, has long been an excruciating pain point. And that’s right where Radiant shines.

First Step: Get Your Identity Data Right

As Radiant technology evangelist and frequent webinar host Wade Ellery says,

“The identity data you rely on for your security must be complete, it must be accurate, and it must be highly available. If it’s incomplete, you can’t make the best decisions. If it’s inaccurate, you’ll make the wrong decision—or worse, you’ll make what you think is a valid decision, but you’re invalid because your data is bad. And if it’s not highly available, it will take too long to make decisions, and speed really matters when it comes to security, access, and user experience.”

RadiantOne Intelligent Identity Data Platform pays off years of IT debt, unifying identity data across all the complexity, diversity, and many incompatibilities of your underlying sources. So identity data becomes instantly consumable in a way that makes it much easier to deliver secure log-ons and immediate granular access to exactly the right resources each user is allowed to see.

Our flagship Identity Data Fabric delivers a single version of identity truth, giving complex organizations one place to go for everything that’s needed, in exactly the right format every time, while quickly enabling key security innovations, such as two-factor authentication and the progressive disclosure that defines a Zero Trust environment.

We look forward to helping federal identity teams successfully deliver on these new mandates and strategies.

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Do You Know What Your Data is Doing?

January 28, 2022/in Blog Chad McDonald/by Josue Ochoa

This week is Data Privacy Week, and the reality is, most people have no idea how their personal information is being used, collected, or shared in today’s digital economy. Without a doubt, part of this can be contributed to modern enterprise identity management practices.

For years now, organizations have suffered from scattered identity data across countless sources, all of which use different protocols or are in modern cloud repositories that can’t connect back to legacy, on-prem technology. This inevitably results in an identity sprawl, with organizations having many different sources of data–often in a hybrid environment–making it impossible to build complete and accurate user profiles.

In addition–no surprise to anyone–the number of identities linked to businesses has dramatically increased over the past two years. 83% report that remote work due to COVID-19 increased the number of identities. This not only causes frustration for employees, who have to remember multiple logins credentials for all of the different applications and profiles that they need as part of their day-to-day job, but also poses significant security and privacy risks. As organizations continue digital transformation, they need to be able to keep their identity data under control and properly managed.

November’s Active Directory Privilege Elevation vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-42287, CVE-2021-4228) offer an example of the value of identity to attackers. In the case of these chained exploits, the attacker can not only gain access to an identity store but escalate privileges of a compromised account to that of Domain Administrator. The attacker effectively captures the crown jewels of the Windows Domain. Introduction of malware, data exfiltration and general mischief all become possible quite easily at this level of access. In the case of Windows, this level of access could actually allow the attacker to reduce or remove security controls enforced by Microsoft’s mobile device management platform, InTune. This alone presents a means to exponentially increase the attack surface to include all managed devices.

The risk associated with a successful exploitation of an identity store warrants perhaps the most rigorous of security controls. Organizations should not overlook the value that identity stores have for attackers. From simply acquiring personal information to compromising a privileged identity, identity stores present a highly valued target to attackers.

Without accurate user profiles, and a unified view of identity, systems are unable to determine what individuals can and can’t access. Siloed systems increase the attack surface of an organization and malware is more likely to remain undetected, increasing the likelihood of a data breach.

While this sounds like a complicated problem to solve, an Identity Data Fabric approach can tackle identity complexity in a matter of weeks, making it much easier to harden the environment and enable a Zero Trust Architecture.

The concept of an Identity Data Fabric is to unify and connect distributed identity data from all sources in an organization, and deliver identity data on-demand wherever and whenever needed. Applications are able to access identity data from this one highly-available source, using different formats and protocols, irrespective if it’s on-premise or in the cloud. Thanks to a global view of each user and their attributes, progressive disclosure is now possible, enabling a Zero Trust approach.

Not only does this mean that organizations have visibility and access to all their identity data when needed, but it also ensures that users’ profiles can stay updated in real-time. Businesses can be confident that employees have access to the right information, yet aren’t able to access areas they don’t need for their job. With identity data managed in one containerized layer, there is less chance of that data being accidentally leaked by employees or stolen by cyber criminals.