Strata Maverics Identity Continuity provides real-time IDP failover capabilities

May 20, 2024

Strata Identity announced Maverics Identity Continuity, a new add-on product to its Maverics Identity Orchestration platform that provides always-on identity continuity in multi-cloud environments.

Unlike regional redundancy offerings from cloud providers and existing backup and restore products that only shorten the time it takes to rebuild IDP (primary identity provider) infrastructures after an outage, Strata’s Identity Continuity product maintains uninterrupted identity services by autonomously and transparently failing over to an alternate IDP.

With many organizations now relying on cloud-based identity services to provide access management for both cloud and on-premises applications, the loss of primary IDP connectivity immediately results in suspending all application access.

Whether due to SaaS misconfigurations, natural disasters, malicious activities that require temporary air-gapping from the internet, or cloud platform outages, these IDP interruptions effectively grind business operations to a halt. As a result, IDP outages can impact an organization’s revenue and productivity and damage its brand.

According to the 2023 State of Multi-cloud Identity Report, 56% of those surveyed said that they experienced interruptions to their cloud IDP twice a year or more, and 62% said they had two or more annual interruptions due to their cloud IDP itself being unavailable. Meanwhile, 23% of business decision-makers surveyed by Parametrix estimated downtime costs their organization $500,000 or more per hour, while 60% said they are “very concerned” about cloud downtime.

If the primary IDP itself is unavailable but network connectivity remains, Maverics will seamlessly switch to a backup cloud IDP. If network connectivity is down, Maverics ensures that users remain connected to the applications they need by providing autonomous failover to an on-premises identity system, like Microsoft Active Directory (AD) or another local user database. Maverics will continue to perform health checks to monitor the status of both network and primary IDP connectivity, and switch user application access flows back when satisfactory service conditions are restored.

“For all their advantages, cloud-based services require uninterrupted connectivity to maintain business continuity. Since identity providers control access to an organization’s applications and data, any downtime can shut down mission-critical operations,” said Eric Olden, CEO of Strata Identity. “Maverics Identity Continuity eliminates single points of failure and provides failsafe protection against a primary IDP going offline by offering several options for maintaining always-on identity. Identity Continuity is like driving a car with the latest accident avoidance technology to prevent collisions altogether, while identity disaster recovery only has airbags and seat belts to minimize the impact of a crash.”

The need for always-on identity

Traditional identity resilience offerings are limited to providing disaster recovery using point-in-time IDP policy configuration backups, but cannot prevent a business’ mission-critical applications from going offline. Regardless of the nature of the outage, Maverics Identity Continuity ensures that users can always access their business apps by providing real-time IDP failover capabilities. Maverics transparently routes app access flows to backup IDPs without impacting users or interrupting business activities.

When a primary identity system is offline, Maverics Identity Continuity performs continuous health monitoring of the primary IDP. In the event of a failure, Maverics can autonomously failover (based on predefined policies) to an alternate IDP. When service is restored, Maverics will transparently move identity services back to the primary IDP without impacting users or their even knowing what happened.

Identity Continuity is made possible via Strata’s unique Schema Abstraction Layer, which translates proprietary attribute schemas from different cloud and on-premises IDP systems and vendors. This enables Maverics to map user, application, and access policy attributes between otherwise incompatible IDPs so identity services continue to function normally when failover to a backup IDP occurs.