Strata Identity, the Identity Orchestration company, is debuting Maverics Identity Continuity, a product addition to Strata’s Maverics Identity Orchestration platform engineered to offer seamless, always-on identity access continuity in multi-cloud environments. As the majority of businesses rely on the cloud, Strata paves the way for continuous application access even when a primary identity provider (IDP) is down, according to the company.
Cloud is the very definition of modern business, yet these enterprises must maintain contingency plans for when they lose connectivity to their IDPs due to SaaS misconfigurations, natural disasters, malicious activities, and so on. Lack of access to applications during these interruptions effectively leaves business at a standstill, damaging revenue, productivity, and brand image, according to Strata.
Though the market offers backup and restore products for these events, it only shortens the time it takes to rebuild single-vendor IDPs after an outage—not avoiding it altogether, according to Strata.
The development of Maverics Identity Continuity aims to prevent applications from ever going offline, ensuring that enterprises always have access to business apps through real-time IDP failover. In the event an IDP becomes unavailable, Maverics ensures connectivity through autonomous failover (based on predefined policies) to an alternate IDP or on-prem system, such as Microsoft Active Directory (AD) or another local user database.
After failover, Maverics continues to monitor the health of both the network and primary IDP, finally transitioning user application access flows back once satisfactory service conditions are met—without disrupting existing workflows. This depth of observability also serves to alert organizations when there is potential for an IDP outage.
“We created Maverics Identity Continuity to enable customers to autonomously failover to an alternate IDP to prevent application access downtime,” explained Gerry Gebel, VP, product and standards at Strata Identity. “Every cloud platform (AWS, MSFT, GCP, etc.) uses its own proprietary identity system. They can't speak to each other; because the Maverics Identity Orchestration platform decouples apps from identity systems, it enables incompatible IDPs to interoperate and for companies to centrally enforce their access policies on any identity system (IDP). This capability allows companies to transparently failover from any IDP to any IDP.”
Strata’s Schema Abstraction Layer—also referred to as an identity fabric—is what enables Maverics Identity Continuity to seamless failover to an alternate IDP. By translating proprietary attribute schemas from different cloud and on-prem IDP systems and vendors, Maverics can map and translate user, application, and access policies from one incompatible IDP to another IDP—a capability unique to the industry, according to Gebel.
“For the first time, companies can prevent an IDP outage from locking users out of their applications. Consider a home improvement company in a hurricane zone, after a storm if they don’t have access to their cloud IDP, their point of sales systems won’t work and customers won’t be able to purchase products to rebuild homes, businesses, etc.,” explained Gebel. “Maverics would allow the company to continue to operate by switching to [an] alternative IDP which could be on-premises.”
To learn more about Strata and its Maverics Identity Orchestration platform, please visit https://www.strata.io/.