Episode 71

Identity Continuity in Multi-Cloud Environments

The importance of maintaining uninterrupted services cannot be overemphasized, especially in light of the recent global IT outage fiasco. With the increasing dependence on cloud-based services, uninterrupted connectivity is essential to maintaining business continuity. Since identity providers control access to an organization's application and data, any downtime can shut down mission-critical operations. It was great to have Eric Olden, Co-Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of Strata Identity, share his thoughts and perspectives on this critical topic.

Action Items and Discussion Highlights

Inventory applications and dependencies to understand risk exposure.

Conduct risk assessment to quantify risk and start with highest priority applications.

Identify single points of failure.

Trust but verify. You want to test things repeatedly so that when that inevitable outage happens, you're confident that the incident will not have drastic consequences.

Balance investment in identity continuity solutions against the cost of potential downtime.

Consider using existing on-premise identity systems like Active Directory as a low-cost redundancy option.

Consider implementing identity orchestration and continuity solutions to introduce redundancy after evaluating cost vs risk.

Create a culture of resilience that is not surprised when an outage happens but can handle it with grace and confidence.

Time Stamps

00:02 -- Introduction

02:33 -- Guest's Professional Highlights

04:32 -- Eric Olden's Perspective on the Global IT Outage Fiasco

09:16 -- Practicality of Maintaining Redundancy

13:21 -- Identity as Mission-Critical Systems

14:03 -- Identifying Single Points of Failure

20:00 -- Developing Always-On Identity Continuity Solution

21:59 -- Interruption Factors

23:12 -- Continuous and Meticulous Risk Assessment

25:11 -- Incident highlighting a proactive approach to identity risk management

29:42 -- Lessons from the Incident

36:35 -- Final Thoughts

Memorable Eric Olden Quotes/Statements

"I think a lot of people are realizing that there's more single points of failure in their environments, which creates a significant amount of risk."

"Identity system is like the front door of the house; without identity security, you cannot access those applications. So identity has become a mission critical system because it has a primacy in terms of how people access the applications and the data to run today's modern enterprise."

"Understand where you have single points of failure because until you do that analysis, you may be assuming that you aren't in a dependent situation because you've got rid of single points of failure in your data infrastructure, but what about the other parts that are not necessarily under your control."

"Trust but verify. You want to test things repeatedly so that when that inevitable outage happens, you're confident that things will not take your business down with you."

"It's not a question of whether something bad will happen in the future. It was a question of when it will happen and how bad it will hurt."

"If you think about the cost of an investment for continuity, you want to ensure that you're not spending more for continuity than it would cost you for downtime."

"Create a culture of resilience that is not surprised when an outage happens, but can handle it with grace and confidence."

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