Uninterrupted access to applications and data is critical in the modern business world. When identity providers (IDPs) aren’t available, neither are your applications. The impact can be severe — financial losses, reputational damage, and operational chaos.  That’s why we built Identity Continuity.

Why we built Identity Continuity

Identity providers are critical for secure and seamless access, but no IDP can guarantee 100% uptime. This raises a critical question: What do you do when your IDP goes offline? 

Enter Identity Continuity, our latest innovation designed to keep your business running smoothly, no matter what.

The supply chain of e-commerce and digital enterprise software is inherently distributed across various clouds and IDPs. A cascading failure in one of the authentication services can have a ripple effect, impacting numerous dependent systems. 

In addition, high-profile breaches and outages have prompted policymakers and governments to enforce new regulations to bolster the resilience of digital operations. The Digital Operations Resilience Act (DORA) in the EU is one such regulation emphasizing the need for businesses to maintain continuous operations even during disruptions.

Finally, deployments in environments characterized by disruptions, disconnections, intermittent connectivity, and low bandwidth (DDIL) require reliable solutions for operating under austere conditions. In such scenarios, how do users access critical applications when disconnected from the cloud?

Why is Identity Continuity important now?

The urgency for robust identity continuity solutions has never been greater. With the increasing frequency of devastating breaches and outages making headlines, enterprises are prioritizing this issue. It has become a top three concern for hundreds of organizations. 

The cost of downtime is escalating as businesses undergo digital transformations and become more dependent on uptime. In 2023, the average cost of downtime was $300,000 per hour, with potential losses reaching millions. As digital enterprises grow, the financial and operational impacts of outages become more severe.

As digital enterprises grow, the financial and operational impacts of outages become more severe.

Maverics’ breakthrough distributed architecture

Since founding Strata Identity five years ago, the most exciting aspect of our journey has been the development of Maverics and its breakthrough distributed architecture. Designed as the first IDP-agnostic Identity Orchestration platform, Maverics leverages the capabilities of distributed multi-cloud computing architecture. 

This innovative approach led to a new way of thinking about identity and access management, opening up possibilities that were previously unattainable with conventional SaaS IDP architectures. Traditional IDP solutions, even with redundant regions, cannot redirect identity traffic to another IDP during an outage because they are inherently single-point systems.

Identity Orchestration changes the game by introducing a fulcrum for IDPs. This allows for dynamic redirection of identity traffic across multiple IDPs within an identity fabric, effectively ensuring continuity. As Archimedes said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” 

Maverics’ unique distributed architecture provides that lever for the first time.

Reducing risk with comprehensive continuity software

Today, resilient identity means access to critical applications that are always on. IAM resilience is marketed by many products, but not all offer the same benefits. In developing our solution, we engaged with the large and most demanding organizations to understand their needs. This led us to define the eight principles of identity continuity:

1. Antifragile identity design: Our goal from day one has been to create a system that performs better under stress rather than collapsing. This principle ensures that the system becomes more robust with each challenge.

2. Prevent outages through continuity: Disaster recovery isn’t enough for many situations where downtime is not an option. The time to restore from backups, often measured in hours or days, is crushing for critical enterprise workloads.

3. No single point of failure: We designed our orchestration software to be inherently redundant, ensuring no single point of failure exists. Comprehensive instrumentation provides operational observability.

4. Data-driven trust: Our Overwatch feature monitors and visualizes the identity fabric, providing continuous performance and availability metrics for cloud and on-premises IDPs.

5. Autonomous or manual failover: Failover and failback processes can be automated or manually triggered, allowing organizations to choose the best method.

6. Schema abstraction layer: Using native IDP schemas and on-the-fly schema mapping, we reconcile incompatible IDPs seamlessly, ensuring smooth operations.

7. Clear auditable policy: Maverics provides clear, auditable policies demonstrating compliance with regulations. It helps detect, resolve, restore, and respond to IDP outage incidents comprehensively.

8. Confidence from proof: Built-in simulation and testing capabilities allow organizations to validate policies and configurations easily and regularly, ensuring confidence in the system’s resilience.

Empowering enterprises with Maverics Identity Continuity

Powered by Maverics’ distributed air gap architecture and these eight principles, Identity Continuity offers enterprises a powerful tool to detect and gracefully manage IDP outages automatically. This ensures that applications and data remain available, protecting against the high costs of downtime.

Identity Continuity is not just about preventing disruptions; it’s about building a resilient infrastructure that can adapt and thrive under pressure. Identity Continuity will be the cornerstone of their digital resilience strategy as businesses evolve.

Stay tuned for more updates and innovations from Strata as we continue to shape the future of identity management!