Managing identities between clouds is the top challenge for businesses

More than three-quarters (78 percent) of respondents to a new survey say managing user identities between multiple clouds is their number one challenge.

The study carried out by Forrester for Strata Identity finds 70 percent want to migrate to the cloud increase security and protect data. But at the same time 28 percent of companies are using four or more public/private clouds today and that's expected to more than double in two years to 65 percent.

Nearly two-thirds of IT decision-makers say the complexity of their firm's current identity and access management (IAM) causes its employees to spend less time on innovation and impedes overall business agility.

"According to the Forrester study, firms can't just lift-and-shift existing IAM tools from on-premises to the cloud," says Eric Olden, CEO of Strata Identity. "Multi-cloud ecosystems are complex and create a broader attack vector, so companies must plan their IAM strategy carefully or risk leaving themselves vulnerable."

The most significant and commonly reported cloud IAM challenges are not having enough time and money (66 percent) and a lack of skills to support complex cloud-based IAM (62 percent). In addition, organizations are struggling to manage and enforce consistent user policies (58 percent) and comply with changing regulations (56 percent). Other concerns are lack of interoperability between IAM solutions and different clouds (48 percent), siloed identity user groups (40 percent), and rewriting apps to modernize or migrate to the cloud (39 percent).

There are significant hurdles to be cleared in moving to the cloud too, these include rewriting apps to modernize or migrate (64 percent), integrating legacy on-premises systems and apps (62 percent), and deploying modern passwordless multi-factor authentication (62 percent).

Among the top investment priorities are deploying customer IAM (59 percent), implementing zero trust architecture (56 percent), and bolstering workforce identity to manage remote work threats (43 percent).

The full report is available from the Strata Identity site.

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