By Gerry Gebel, VP of Products and Standards at Strata Identity

In 2025, enterprises will face transformative challenges and opportunities in managing identity security, resilience, and governance. From the rise of multi-IDP (identity provider) architectures to the adoption of event-driven identity management, organizations will increasingly be required to balance innovation with operational complexity.

The growing importance of identity continuity and application governance will underscore the need for robust strategies that can adapt to dynamic environments, such as multi-cloud ecosystems and hybrid infrastructures. These predictions highlight the trends reshaping identity and access management (IAM), offering actionable insights for enterprises to stay ahead in securing their digital ecosystems.

1. Managing Multi-IDP Architectures Becomes the New Normal

•  Prediction: Large enterprises will increasingly adopt multiple Identity Providers (IDPs) to optimize flexibility, enhance security and resilience, and choose best-in-class services for individual use cases. This shift toward multi-IDP environments will mitigate vendor lock-in and align with evolving infrastructure needs.

•  Implications: Managing identity across multiple IDPs will require enterprises to invest in interoperable identity orchestration tools for streamlined access control and policy enforcement. This is particularly critical in M&A scenarios, where acquisitions result in diverse IDP landscapes. Identity orchestration will emerge as the key enabler for integration and governance of these heterogeneous stacks.

2. Wider Adoption of Event-Based Identity Management

• Prediction: Event-based IAM systems will see broad adoption, offering dynamic, real-time security controls that adapt to run-time events and contextual data, such as high-risk transactions, changes in location and device status, and more. A key development in 2025 will be the standardization of the CAEP (Continuous Access Evaluation Protocol) profile.

• Implications: Enterprises must transition from static IAM models to event-driven architectures. Organizations will need to plan on how to adopt CAEP and publish event data. This will require integrating senders and receivers of event data and implementing orchestrators capable of taking action on event signals, such as revoking sessions, enforcing step-up authentication, etc.

3. Identity Continuity Becomes Business Critical

• Prediction: As multi-cloud and hybrid environments proliferate, ensuring identity continuity will become a critical component of disaster recovery plans. Enterprises will prioritize the ability to switch between IDPs during outages to maintain business operations seamlessly.

• Implications: Recent large-scale outages in SaaS-based services have underscored the need for resilient identity systems. To minimize risks, enterprises will need to invest in multi-layered failover strategies, backup IDP infrastructures, and rigorous testing. This will require taking responsibility for resilience rather than solely relying on the assurances of IDP vendors for business continuity.

Back up and recovery are not the only option any more - continuity for IAM infrastructure will take center stage.

4. Increased Focus on Application Governance

• Prediction: Application ecosystems will grow in complexity, driving enterprises to adopt application fabrics for unified governance and compliance. Continuous discovery and monitoring will become cornerstones of effective identity management.

• Implications: Implementing an application fabric will streamline identity orchestration and governance by centralizing policies and reducing manual configurations. However, integrating legacy systems and coordination between IT and business units will remain challenging. Discovery capabilities that span applications, users, access and authorization policies, etc., for both cloud-based and on-premise applications, will be required to meet the needs of application owners that lack this visibility.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gerry Gebel is VP of Products and Standards at Strata Identity and a recognized leader in cloud identity and access management with more than 20 years of experience in requirements definition, architecture development and strategic planning for identity management projects with Fortune 500 corporations. Gerry leads the effort with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to develop Identity Query Language (IDQL), a policy orchestration standard, and the Hexa open-source project. He also co-chairs the OpenID Foundation AuthZEN working group where he works to standardize authorization systems. He was a senior executive with Axiomatics and a VP with research firm Burton Group (acquired by Gartner). Gerry started his career in the technology group at Manhattan Bank (now part of JP Morgan Chase).