Comedian Colin Quinn says identity is a big thing. “Your id is who the government says you are. Your personality is the people who know you think you are, your reputation is the people who don’t know you think you are, your social media profile is who you think you are, and your browser history is who you really are.”

While my writing about identity management isn’t going to make the comedy circuit, I  recently updated my explainer piece for CSOonline. Identity is even more important these days, as enterprises move into more cloudy and virtual infrastructures, federate apps with their partners and customers, and try to protect themselves against supply-chain attacks that can tie them in knots for weeks and months.  And thanks to poor multi-factor implementations, more sophisticated phishing methods, more automated credential stuffing techniques and numerous legacy IAM systems that haven’t been updated, bad actors can often find easy entries with minimal effort into corporate systems to ply their exploits.

IAM needs to be a well-integrated fabric or mesh of architectures and processes that connect everything together into a coherent whole that can protect the entire digital surface of an enterprise. This fabric uses adaptive risk assessments to authenticate and connects both people and machines and uses information collected from continuous threat detection and operations visibility. My post explains how to get to this state, and some things that enterprise IT managers need to consider in their evaluations.