My name is Reece Price. I am a cybersecurity professional who has spent the first decade of my career in the identity space, working in higher education, consulting, and now for a private business services company. 

Identiverse, Year Two

2025 was my 2^nd time attending Identiverse, and I had a great repeat experience. In my current role, I am not here to sell a new product or gain a new client; I am looking to learn where the industry is headed and how AI will impact it. Several of my I&A (Identity and Access) colleagues joined me at Identiverse, so I hope it allows us to supercharge any takeaways.  A few of my highlights are as follows.

B2B CIAM

B2B CIAM is still flying under the radar, in my opinion. But Thales hosted two great sessions. Italian Precision and German Creativity: A conversation on Optimizing B2B Services; and B2B IAM Smackdown: Defending the Future of Partner Identity. Both sessions were very thought-provoking as I continue to mature my own B2B CIAM program. 

Decentralized Identity

Decentralized Identity is the future of how the world can get to a place where physical wallets with a Driver’s License are a thing of the past. However, to get to that world, the world’s governments will play a crucial role in making this happen, both from a policy standpoint and by adopting the right technology without critical flaws. As Identity professionals, we must ensure this technology is developed and securely deployed worldwide. 

And of course, AI

AI, any list about a technology conference without AI would be lacking. AI will change the world, but Andre Durand (Ping Identity) mentioned in his keynote that verified trust will ensure our new AI-powered world is secure and allows transactions to flow across the internet. It’s now not good enough to know that Reece can complete a transaction; we must understand if Reece has authorized some agent (AI or not) to complete this transaction. 

Identiverse, Year 3?

Overall, if you are an Identity professional and are unsure about attending next year, I can’t recommend it enough. Everyone in the Identity industry can find something at Identiverse that they can learn from.  Hope to see everyone again in Las Vegas for Identiverse 2026.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in the content are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDPro organization.

Author

Reece Price, CIAM Manager at CSCGlobal, is a seasoned CISSP-certified IAM leader with extensive experience in the commercial, government, and academic IAM sectors. He has worked with most major vendors, including Ping Identity (ForgeRock), SailPoint, and Okta. Using his background and experience, He can understand your technology, business, and people to create solutions that work for everyone.

The post Identiverse 2025 from an Identity Practitioner appeared first on IDPro.

On May 28, 2024, the first Innovation Workshop was held at Identiverse. In a packed room, participants held a lively discussion focused on overcoming obstacles to empower innovators to advance identity and security.

Dr. Tina P. Srivastava, Co-Founder of Badge Inc., and Bob Blakley, Co-Founder of Mimic and former Global Director of Information Security Innovation at Citi, two identity leaders, led the workshop. Pam Dingle, Director of Identity Standards at Microsoft, acted as the facilitator.

Why a Workshop?

Identity is becoming a cornerstone of modern IT infrastructure, serving as a new perimeter. Therefore, the need for cutting-edge innovation is not just a nice-to-have but a need-to-have as identity solutions are safeguarding access to the most important networks, information, systems, and our personal data. Teams tackling identity and security, whether in organizations or companies, need to innovate and draw from a diversity of ideas and include new people in identity projects, and yet there are challenges in bringing in and empowering these innovators. Innovating in the context of intellectual property constraints, national security restrictions, and tight budgets is challenging. Yet it is imperative.

Dr. Srivastava shared research from her book Innovating in a Secret World: The Future of National Security and Global Leadership, including examples from the pharmaceutical industry, an industry cloaked in secrecy given the high costs of R&D and need for intellectual property protection.

Identity Innovation is Essential

Identity is essential to access healthcare services, financial systems, and the economy, so innovation must account for the whole spectrum of user experiences. Pam Dingle brought the audience into the conversation. Drawing on their respective experiences from national security defense and financial institutions, two of the most high-security fields, Dr. Srivastava and Dr. Blakley shared practical guidance on navigating these hurdles. During this interactive workshop, Tina and Bob led a discussion about the importance of bringing in new voices, the challenges we’re facing in today’s hybrid work environment, and how to overcome them. Tina shared specific use cases from her research at MIT about how certain classes of innovators are unintentionally excluded, and Bob discussed challenges and strategies to overcome them.

Dr. Blakley shared some key lessons learned as an Innovation leader at Citi. For example, he noted that the system has to want to change and highlighted the importance of working in a diverse team. Bob discussed that innovative solutions arise from conversations with others, not solo meditation.

Bob noted the importance of the conversation about innovation given that the environment is changing as fast as any in his decades of working in identity and security. Discussions from the Innovation Workshop carried into the break and even continued at the IDPro booth later on during Identiverse. Pictured below, Sarah Cecchetti, Mat Hamlin, and Dr. Tina Srivastava share information about IDPro, including about CIDPRO certification, with Identiverse attendees.

Author

Dr. Tina P. Srivastava is an entrepreneur, author, inventor of more than 15 patents, and an MIT-trained rocket scientist. She served as Chief Engineer of electronic warfare programs at Raytheon before founding a cybersecurity startup that was acquired by a public company and global leader in network security. She is an FAA-certified pilot and is a Lecturer at MIT in Aeronautics and Astronautics.

When her identity was stolen in a data breach in 2015, Dr. Srivastava teamed up with a group of MIT cryptography PhDs to crack the code on one of the most common reasons for modern data breaches: stored credentials. Together, they solved a decades-old cryptography problem to remove PII, biometrics and other stored credentials from the authentication equation, eliminating highly vulnerable storage systems as points of attack for hackers. Badge Inc. is the award-winning privacy company enabling Identity without Secrets.

The post Highlights from the first Identiverse Innovation Workshop appeared first on IDPro.

Together with fellow IDPro member Lorrayne Auld (recently retired from MITRE), I’m excited to be co-leading the Deployments and Leading Practices (D&LP) topic once again. In this blog, we’ll take a look at some of the upcoming highlights for our track.

D&LP Track Highlights

Come to the Identiverse D&LP sessions to learn how IAM practitioners are dealing with identity at scale. These sessions frequently involve large, global enterprises facing challenging implementations with lots of complexity. We’ll have sessions about both workforce and customer identity. Our speakers come to us from multiple countries, multiple industries, and varied backgrounds. They represent higher education, manufacturing, retail, consulting firms, finance, and various identity-related organizations.

Identiverse’s theme this year is “Identity Everywhere,” which offers plenty of latitude for our topics. You’ll hear from companies like General Motors, Otis Worldwide, and McDonald’s with real-world stories of challenges they’ve solved. You’ll also be hearing from experts hailing from Wavestone, Amazon Web Services, UberEther, and ProofID.

This year, D&LP has two panels:

• 2023 Trends in Securing Digital Identities featuring Jeff Reich, Diane Hagglund, Tom Sheffield, Rajnish Bhatia, and Bernard Diwakar
• Passkey Early Adopters Fireside Chat moderated by Andrew Shikiar from the FIDO Alliance

Thirteen Great D&LP Sessions

Let’s review some of the sessions:

• Learn how Ebony Love and her team at McDonald’s accelerated crew onboarding
• Explore Andrew Cameron’s Zero Trust Architecture for B2C Identity at GM
• Discover the challenges Alyson Ruff and her team at Otis Worldwide encountered when implementing their passwordless program
• There will be two more sessions on passwordless journeys shared by Michal Kepkowski, Maciej Machulak, Nathan Macrides, and Chintan Jain
• We have three sessions on passkeys (the new hotness) from Huan Liu (Block Inc.), Dean Saxe (AWS), and Rolf Lindermann (Nok Nok Labs)
• Join Bertrand Carlier from Wavestone for what is bound to be an entertaining and informative session on mission-critical SSO for millions of users
• Did you ever wish you could bring continual dynamic authorization to COTS applications? Join Paul Heaney from ProofID to find out how!
• We’ll hear from Matt Connors, CISO at Southern New Hampshire University, and Robert Block from Strivacity on customer IAM lessons learned from their students
• Sarah Villarmarzo from Easy Dynamics will help us learn to trust the process when it comes to Zero Trust
• Tabitha Hancock from UberEther will walk us through the not-so-obvious parts of application onboarding
• Ken Robertson from Fifth Third Bank will help you jumpstart your privileged account management program
• Integrating custom applications to MFA can be a major challenge. Sandeep Talwar from Accenture Federal will share the story of their approach
• Jim Routh of Jimmer Advisory Services LLC will discuss the road to continuous authentication

Content review for these sessions is already underway, and the early drafts are looking good. I can’t wait to see the finished product, and I hope to see you at Identiverse in Las Vegas! If you haven’t already registered to attend, what are you waiting for?

Author

Greg Smith

Chair, IDPro Editorial

Radiant Logic

Greg Smith is a Senior Solution Consultant with Radiant Logic, where he serves as a trusted advisor for new and existing customers. He has been implementing Identity & Access Management solutions for over 35 years. He holds BSEG and MSBA degrees from Bucknell University, where he also began his professional career before moving into the pharmaceutical industry in 1996. Following a 25-year career there, he retired in November 2021 from Johnson & Johnson, where he led the engineering team for J&J’s single sign-on, risk-based authentication, multi-factor authentication, access governance, directory synchronization and virtualization, provisioning automation, and PKI services. He has spoken at Identiverse® and other industry events on numerous occasions. He was CIDPRO certified in October 2021 and is also a founding member of IDPro, where he currently chairs the editorial committee.

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