Towards a Unified Framework for Identity Governance in Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Environments

Abstract

The use of multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructure has increased exponentially among businesses that are in need of agility, resiliency, and optimization of costs. This change poses significant challenges in identity governance where identities are distributed between several providers, directory services, and federated systems. Existing divided strategies cause policy discrepancy, privilege escalation opportunities, visibility bubbles, and the absence of breach vulnerability. The need to have unified identity governance frameworks that deal with authentication, authorization, lifecycle management, and compliance across heterogeneous environments has become mandatory. Both Federation standards, such as SAML 2.0 and OpenID Connect, as well as SCIM 2.0, provide interoperability and automated lifecycle management and least privilege enforcement, minimizing attack surfaces. Machine identities now massively exceed human identities, but do not receive due governance focus despite posing a high threat in the form of threat vectors. Scalability requires it to process millions of authentication events each day and still replying in sub-second response times in distributed architectures. The wider social consequences include issues of privacy, fair accessibility to various groups of people, accountability, and issues of digital sovereignty, as well as economics. The organizations using unified frameworks experience significantly reduced security incidents, reduced costs in management, shorter process of lifecycle and enhanced capabilities of compliance, and retained the ability to innovate across cloud frameworks.