The IBM Office of the CIO faced two daunting challenges.

Firstly, they needed to provide identity and access authentication services for over 500,000 employees worldwide, using a highly customized, on-premises platform. Secondly, they had to also provide these services for 27 million clients using a first generation IDaaS solution.

The IBM Office of the CIO faced a challenging task: integrating two different identity and access management platforms with varying technologies, reliability, and functionality. The scope of the challenge was immense, with support needed for thousands of applications, hundreds of client companies, and hundreds of thousands of authorization groups. In just one quarter of 2021, IBM authentication services handled millions of logins. With the constantly changing competitive landscape, the need for transformation was clear. The Director of the Assured Identity and Cybersecurity Operations team highlighted the importance of providing critical identity services for IBM's workforce, clients, and Kyndryl. The transformation required significant infrastructure modernization and consolidation to ensure reliable and secure large-scale delivery. The Assured Identity Architect and his team conducted a thorough analysis of leading vendors to find a cloud-based authentication platform that would enable modernization of identity services for both IBM employees and customers. Following best practices, the Assured Identity and Cybersecurity Operations team captured their requirements and evaluated multiple solutions from the market.

IBM Security™ Verify (SaaS) Chosen as the Standard Cloud IAM Services Platform with Enhanced Security and User Experience

The Assured Identity and Cybersecurity Operations team has selected IBM Security Verify as their chosen solution for millions of internal and external users. The decision was driven by the seamless application migration enabled by APIs and the ability to customize the user interface without depleting development resources.

By embracing IBM Security Verify as the standard cloud IAM services platform, IBM is prepared to deploy modern identity capabilities with improved security, scalability, and user experience. This includes expanding internal user choice for authentication through two-factor authentication (2FA) and implementing adaptive features that determine when additional authentication is required.

The transition to IBM Security Verify was made smoother by leveraging existing investments and processes, ensuring minimal impact with a carefully staggered migration plan. The enhanced API library provided self-service application migration for application owners, minimizing disruption to other workloads. Additionally, the privileged API access control offered tighter security control over the environment, reducing attack vectors.

The adoption of IBM Security Verify has not only improved the user experience but also tightened security for users and the company's network, data, and applications at scale. The capabilities of IBM Security Verify include extensible features for enhanced security, flexible multi-factor authentication methods, improved password management, user ID self-care and lifecycle management, application management, and flexible user notification.

Moving forward, IBM's identity and access authentication journey promises a transformed user experience without passwords, enhanced protection for privileged users in multicloud environments, integration with device and mobile device management solutions, a microservices architecture for improved fault tolerance and scalability, enhanced reliability with multi-site plans, and a continued focus on user experience with strengthened commitment to security and privacy.

Gary Schmader, Sr. Manager of Assured Identity, sums it up by emphasizing the reliance on IBM Security Verify for a mission-critical need on a grand scale. With IBM Security Verify, IBM can provide frictionless, secure access to information resources, and this is just the beginnin.