Some on the next 10-ish years in identity management.
[This was originally written in December 2019: pre-pandemic, pre-US presidential election, pre-George Floyd. Truly, it was written in the “Before Times.” I thought about updating this before posting but that felt wrong – somehow dishonest. So here is the lightly touched up text of my talk which was given first in Tokyo at the OpenID Foundation Summit and then again as part of the all-virtual Identiverse. If you want to skip the text and go straight to the video, you can!
My deepest thanks go to Naohiro Fujie and Nat Sakimura for prompting me to write this, Andi Hindle for his feedback. – IG 11/24/2020]
It is my honor to present to you today. Today, it is my privilege to talk to you about my vision of the future of digital identity. When Naohiro-san asked me to speak on this topic, I was both honored and panicked. In my daily role, I focus on a 12 to 18 month time frame. My primary task is to help my stakeholders and, yes I have a multi-year vision, but I primarily focus on how my team can execute in the next few months to help those stakeholders. I don’t, as a matter of my daily routine, think about the future.
So I was a little panicked. I am not a futurist. I am no longer an industry analyst. I am just a practitioner trying to help where I can. How then should I talk about the next ten years of our industry?
I can name 4 ways to think about the future and with your permission I will briefly try all 4.
Looking at the Past to See the Future
One way to talk about the future is to look back at past predictions and see how they fared. I’ll choose 3 predictions:
- The Need for Password Vaulting
- SAML is Dead
- The Year of PKI (Again…Still)