Identity Technical Debt

Identity technical debt is kryptonite for the prosperity and longevity of any technology-based business. At some point in time, legacy components, software, and aging assets and resources will no longer meet modern business demands and information security requirements. After the short duration of seven years, many components will be designated as end of life and will be queued for replacement or modernization. After all, most endpoint hardware does not even last that long, and we are lucky if back-end systems might last a touch longer. However, some infrastructure resources, like identity governance and access management, may lag behind other initiatives and lead to identity technical debt, simply due to their complexity and scope of deployment. The reasons for this offset are not trivial and are laden with a variety of dependencies—from vendor-update complexities to customized environments that have no path for modernization to the solutions that are simply too cost-prohibitive to maintain.