Research has forecasted that the identity and access management market will reach $20 billion by 2024, an analysis conducted by MarketWatch. Despite this market projecting tremendous growth, the predominant challenge businesses face is that most traditional identity governance products from major vendors are toolkits, not solutions. The manual nature of these products results in a myriad of problems, most notably slow time to value and security exposures. Furthermore, organizations face high costs for deployment, customization and ongoing management, as well as increased infrastructure complexity. The whole issue is exacerbated by a years-long skills shortage in the industry. As a result of these complex challenges, Gartner estimates that at least 50 percent of identity governance initiatives are in distress.
Seamlessly addressing the above challenges is N8 Identity, with its novel and ground-breaking solution, TheAccessHub. “We have fundamentally changed the way identity governance will be done in the future. Rather than taking cumbersome, brittle, and manual approaches to addressing these security needs, we are heavily utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning to address many of the challenges that plague traditional identity governance tools,” says Jay O’Donnell, CEO of N8 Identity.
Delving deeper into the offering, TheAccessHub leverages the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to highlight security exposure areas that are frequently missed within an organization. TheAccessHub performs real-time peer analysis and comparison of access, offering deep analytics to understand a colleague’s representative risk to an organization. It delivers insights and guidance to non-technical business users to understand the appropriate level of access for each colleague with recommendations regarding what their access levels should be thereby allowing users appropriate entitlements and access within a stipulated timeframe. TheAccessHub also offers intelligent reconciliation and synchronization with external systems.
In addition, TheAccessHub is 100 percent cloud-based and mobile to improve business agility, and it can be deployed and operational in days or weeks — rather than months or years like traditional identity governance platforms.
An End-to-end Solution Provider
Founded in Ontario in 2000, the company’s core competencies lie in business case development, product selection, architecture and road mapping, implementation, production deployment and managed services. “On the services side, we assist customers with their strategic identity management and identity access, governance road mapping, architecture assessments, remediation activities and implementation services, to name a few,” says Jay. N8 Identity’s team of technically adept professionals with deep domain expertise and industry-rich experience assists its client base in meeting their unique security and compliance goals with its leading-edge suite of products. In conjunction with the company’s portfolio of products, the team also architects, designs, implements, manages, and supports products from other leading vendors.
Assuring Superior Customer Satisfaction
The team has closely worked with several renowned organizations across various industry verticals in meeting their business objectives. One such client was a company with 40,000 employees geographically dispersed across more than 1,000 locations and over one million customers worldwide. After only a few months working with N8 Identity, it was observed that the company’s security posture had significantly and measurably improved. The company realized annualized savings of $3.8MM. “We operationalized the environment and scaled it to their entire employee base as well as their customer base. From a security audit and compliance-impact perspective, we turned the red lights on their failed security audits to green,” reveals Jay.
In Stride with Advancing Technologies
In parallel with various advancing technologies and gearing up for the future, N8 Identity is heavily investing in AI and machine learning as they anticipate that, over the next five years, these technologies will play a central and critical role in identity governance. This overlays the company’s vision of autonomous identity governance which entails replacing manually routine tasks with AI and machine learning. Not only does this drive efficiency, but it dramatically improves the security posture of an organization by providing guidance and insights to non-technical business users, enabling them to make better choices around user access.
Blockchain is yet another technology that is likely to impact customer identity management, so N8 Identity is exploring that, as well. Jay envisions this to be the next technology that will factor into the shift that occurs as consumers begin to gradually take back control over their personal information.
Additionally, with the explosion of smart devices for better connectivity, the Internet of Things (IoT) is also on N8’s radar. Researchers predict that existing identity governance platforms will have to be completely rewritten as they will be unable to rise above the IoT wave and scale up. However, since TheAccessHub is cloud-based and AI-driven, it’s already ahead of the game. N8 Identity’s team is already developing consumer-facing versions of the solution for broader market use.
