Last week, we hosted the annual #cloudidsummit Tweet Jam. Identity experts were tweeting about this year’s theme of ‘Intelligent Identity’ as a preview to the conversations we expect at CIS in June. The best news of all is a special promotion that was announced during the Tweet Jam that you can use even if you couldn’t participate. And to top it off, the code has been extended for one more week!
In case you missed the Tweet Jam, we have compiled the tweets for you, and provided a few highlights for each of the questions that were asked. Feel free to jump in and add your own thoughts on Twitter, too. Just make sure to use: #cloudidsummit.
Q1: Blockchain promises to be the single biggest ___________ of modern era.
Blockchain (and distributed ledger technology generally) has had a lot of identity press in the last 12 months, much of it less than positive! Now that some of the hype has died down, we wondered whether there are actually any real identity problems that are solved better (or, at all!) with distributed ledgers. The jury’s still out… the debate will continue!
Q2: Describe the worst IoT idea and argue why. Pictures welcome!
The participants weren’t short of ideas and input for this one. Big surprise. Your homework, then, is to help answer the question: what can we do as an industry to make this better?
Q3: How do companies need to prepare for new regulations such as PSD2, GDPR and Open Banking?
“Now is the perfect time to…PANIC!” Apparently not, though. Good news here: a modern identity infrastructure provides a solid foundation to help deal with the challenges (and grasp the opportunities) created by evolving regulatory frameworks. And the emphasis on privacy was welcomed by many.
Q4: What digital identity trend are you most excited about right now?
One of the harder questions we posed during the Tweet Jam, simply because there a lots of things to get excited about at the moment! The increasing number of open standards, activities around improving security and convenience for customer-facing implementations, and the slow but steady advent of intelligence-based identity systems garnered most of the attention. But plenty of other topics came up, too.
Q5: What’s the most interesting identity angle to the AI story? How are authentication expectations evolving?
Most participants were positive about the ways that AI could potentially improve our approach to a range of identity problems, including authentication, authorization and fraud/risk analysis. Some also pointed out that we need to exercise caution here, and that standards and regulations may need to evolve in parallel.
Q6: Will my self-driving car need its own identity? Why?
Surprisingly, no one got into the question of liability on this one! But there was lots of commentary about the way the autonomous vehicles will need to interact with other systems (traffic management, police, licensing authorities, other vehicles, home automation…) and that this will likely drive (no pun intended!) a need for an in-vehicle identity stack.
Q7: What do enterprises need to do to balance privacy and security?
There was clear consensus that these two things are not contradictory–they go hand-in-glove. And by and large, we have the right tools and technologies in place to do what’s needed. There’s more work to do and regulation may be needed to help speed adoption, but the sense is generally that there’s good progress in the right direction here.
Q8: What’s the biggest way to get consumers to protect their digital identity?
Ah, the elephant in the room! Should we expect consumers to do this? Or should we be ensuring that we mandate and build systems that do this from the outset? A little bit of both is, perhaps, the answer.
Thanks again to our moderator Elinor Mills at the Bateman Group and to all the participants that jumped in on the conversation last week, we look forward to hearing more from you all at the Cloud Identity Summit, June 19-22.