With 81% of attacks originating through compromised credentials1 it's
crucial for almost every company to run a state-of-the-art User Identity and
Access Management (UIAM) solution covering multiple dimensions (authentication,
authorization, federation).
The key is providing a first-class customer experience, robust security
including zero trust security models, data protection, and ensuring compliance
with legal regulations - requirements often diametrically opposed. In addition,
a user is not only an individual or a customer but can also be a device,
application, data center, or any other connection to the network.
Apart from being difficult and costly to develop and maintain a UIAM solution,
it only makes limited sense for companies to divert scarce resources from their
core business to establish their own UIAM solution.
Developing and maintaining a UIAM yourself requires ...
Keeping up with the latest market developments
First, companies need to develop the latest security methods which are
constantly progressing. These include multi-factor authentication, adaptive MFA
(AMFA), that asks for additional factors based on a risk score, passwordless
authentication, one-time passwords, and others. Today, customers don't want
passwords. Tomorrow, passwords sent to their smartphone via text message will be
too much hassle.
Second, sophisticated cyber threats and attacks are increasingly taking
advantage of compromised account credentials. - Don't let your homegrown UIAM
solution become the "weakest link" in your company's security chain.
Third, the compliance landscape is constantly changing and becoming more complex
— security and privacy regulations such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, the U.S. Health
Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Data Protection
Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) are just a few
of the requirements that are constantly being enacted, updated, replaced and
revised. A non-compliant DIY UIAM solution could result in heavy fines and other
sanctions for your business not to mention loss of brand and customer trust -
difficult to quantify in monetary terms.
A lot of custom code
You might be surprised, that 77 percent of all application vulnerabilities are
discovered in custom code. These vulnerabilities expose your company and
customers to significant risks and create significant technical legacy and
opportunity costs.
In addition, developers spend almost 50 percent of their time debugging and
maintaining flawed legacy code instead of developing new apps2, leading to a
decreased time-to-market and hindering their ability to meet rapidly evolving
their customer demands.
A complex and expensive infrastructure
Designing, building, and maintaining the necessary infrastructure for a
scalable, secure, 24/7/365 available service is complex and expensive.
Customers expect seamless and secure access to your mobile apps, websites, and
partner portals with their preferred devices from anywhere, anytime, 24/7/365 -
whether it's Black Friday, advance ticket sales for a hot concert, or any other
peak period. Downtime leads to bad customer experience and damages your brand.
Do you really want to manage your own infrastructure and deal with system
failures, maintenance downtime, and upgrades? Before you decide to build your
own UIAM solution, you should also consider the total cost of ownership,
including legacy technology, the risk of security security breaches, and
opportunity costs.
Conclusion
In summary, running a user identity and access management (UIAM) solution
yourself can be difficult and costly due to several reasons. Firstly, developing
and maintaining a UIAM requires keeping up with the latest product features, the
latest security methods, and constant changes in the compliance landscape. In
particular, a non-compliant DIY UIAM solution could result in heavy fines and
other sanctions. Secondly, developing a comprehensive UIAM requires a
significant amount of custom code, which can introduce vulnerabilities and
hinder development efforts. Lastly, building and maintaining the necessary
infrastructure for a scalable and secure service is complex and expensive, and
system failures and downtime can negatively impact the customer experience and
brand reputation. Considering these factors, for most companies it makes more
sense to focus on their core business and rely on specialized UIAM solutions.
About Ory Network
Ory Network is a global, high availability, and low latency user identity &
access management network that protects identities and other first-party data.
Ory Network offers cloud-native, end-to-end services dedicated to securing and
managing user authentication, authorization, and API protection for humans,
robots, devices, and software across various internet services. State-of-the-art
solutions for access security include passkeys, passwordless login, social
login, second-factor authentication, multi-factor authentication, and hardware
tokens.
Ory Network helps its customers use zero-trust security across their stack
including data protection, compliance, and risk management. It delivers
information security using advanced AI analytics for any data created by system
access including authentication, authorization, and API traffic. Ory is an
open-source organization welcoming collaboration and contributions to its
leading products from an active global community. With more than 30,000
community members and over 250 GitHub repositories, Ory maintains the world's
leading open-source identity management, authentication, and authorization
ecosystem and community. Ory Network builds on this knowledge and experience.
