A hybrid identity

As already touched on in the previous chapter, before the advent of the public internet and cloud technologies that gradually decentralized the services accessed by an organization outside of the organization’s perimeter, it was sufficient to provide users with an authentication model that granted access to internal assets. Information technology efforts were mainly focused on keeping the perimeter secure and preventing malicious users from breaching security defenses and, consequently, accessing sensitive assets within the organization’s internal network.

Let’s imagine the typical workday of an employee, Alice, in the early 2000s. Alice is a part of the engineering team of a big manufacturing company and she needs to use several services to fulfill her role and responsibilities. Alice turns on her Personal Computer (PC) first thing in the morning and logs into the operating system. She then starts her mail client to access her emails. Next...