2019: The Continued Evolution of Identity

by Steve Ferrisn on January 23, 2019

Identity and the role of identity management have changed greatly since ForgeRock began. Back in 2010, Identity was predominately internal, focused on employees’ access to the systems to do their jobs. One of ForgeRock’s founding principles was that we knew customers were looking to digitally transform how they engage with their consumers, citizens, and even things. At the beginning of the ForgeRock journey, we often found ourselves helping our customers form a single view of their consumers or citizens to better understand how they were digitally engaging with the services with a view to improving their digital experience. This was the beginning of the app economy and Identity lies at the very heart of this digital experience. We have developed out our platform to help our customers securely serve their customers. Understanding the importance that Identity plays in this new world is vital, in the old internal world Identity has little impact on society at large, in the new external world Identity lies at the centre of everything.

Today, the ForgeRock Identity Platform is excellent at providing a broad functionality for Identity. This is because Identity, at its core, is pervasive in all forms, in all verticals: healthcare, telco, retail, government, media, automotive, financial services and so on. Identity pervades different applications as well and the more it pervades, the more value it generates. If you’re an organisation with multiple brands for example, then you probably have identity silos across those brands, but individuals who interact with the multiple brands may not necessarily be linked. With Identity, you can deliver a more seamless, secure and consistent experience with greater insight into customer activity.

When you look at the changes ForgeRock has made over the last few years, the shift to cloud has been very significant. Our latest 6.5 release that we delivered in December enables rapid deployment of the platform into the cloud of your choice, with a hardened, resilient production deployment, up and running in minutes. The ForgeRock Product and Engineering team have been working tirelessly to ensure our platform is 100% Cloud native, taking away the work that you once needed to do to stand up the platform. Check out this video to learn more.

Context has always been a huge part of our platform. Incremental data profiling for example, exists within context: you wouldn’t ask a customer for their address unless you were going to send them something. Over the past few years, our platform has advanced to enable you to build a progressive view of the customer in context, and we’ve gone deeper in the 6.5 release. Companies leveraging context with the customers allows them to build trust into that relationship, customers are happy to allow their data to be accessed and used providing they understand the how and the why.

Customers are also increasingly wanting to consume things as a service so ForgeRock delivering functionality to expose this digital immersive experience in an easy straightforward manner. In 2019 you’ll see us focus on delivering smarter identity, in areas such as orchestration; deliver more for cloud and DevOps, and more with APIs. It’ll be an exciting year for ForgeRock and our customers and partners. Let me know if we’re aligned with your business priorities.