The IAM of Theseus 

You’ve probably heard of mighty Theseus. He was a Greek divine hero and mythological founder of Athens, gifted with superhuman strength, agility, accuracy, and durability who famously slayed a terrifying minotaur. He also had a ship.

The Ship of Theseus is a famous thought experiment about whether an object which has had all of its original components replaced remains the same object.

According to legend, every year the Athenians commemorated Theseus’s victory over the minotaur by sailing his ship along the same route, and over the centuries parts of the ship would require replacing. Perhaps the oars were replaced after a decade. Then the mast was replaced a few decades after that. Then the hull, and so on.

This led Ancient Greek philosophers to question - if each individual part of the Ship of Theseus is replaced, one at a time, does it remain the same ship? Which is fascinating, but what does it have to do with IAM?

Well, with the current turbulence in the IAM market, a number of Fortune 500 companies have approached us recently, looking to replace parts of their IAM infrastructure, and they have all had similar queries: can we add individual modules from the Thales OneWelcome Identity Platform to our IAM system - and will it impact the rest of the platform?

If you replace each part of your IAM one step at a time, does it remain the same IAM platform?

As always with philosophy, you can look at it from different perspectives:
 

YES!

You still retain complete control of your IAM platform - and adding a Thales module will not have any impact on the rest of your IAM ecosystem.
What it will do is help you achieve singular objectives quickly and easily. For example, you might want to accelerate your transformation into Multi Factor Authorization (MFA) and go passwordless.
Adding the Thales module for this will provide an extra layer of security to your existing IAM platform - and provide a more frictionless journey for users - but by adding this module you still retain your existing IAM platform functionality.

NO!

If you start replacing individual modules of your existing platform, it does not remain the same platform, because over time it becomes a new, improved, more efficient, more robust, more compliant IAM platform.
However, because these changes happen over time, it still looks and feels like the same IAM platform, with the gradual improvements simply providing additional ease- of-use and functionality.

Interestingly, both ways of approaching this situation can be equally beneficial in one regard, they allow you to create a multi-vendor IAM strategy. This strategy is becoming increasingly popular for Enterprise Architects who are reluctant to rely on a single vendor to provide all of their IAM solutions.

Employing a multi-vendor strategy provides strength through diversity

Much like financial investing, when it comes to selecting IAM vendors to work with, diversification is key. Large enterprises who rely on a single IAM vendor can suddenly find themselves the victim of mergers and acquisitions, which disrupt services, deployments and leave roadmaps gathering dust in the corner, while all of the admin and contracts are worked through.

Then there are the inevitable changes to personnel. IAM platforms are complex systems, which require long-term business relationships to achieve their full potential. Mergers and acquisitions tend to result in a streamlining of headcounts, and there’s no guarantee who will be servicing your account from one month to the next.

A multi-vendor approach, on the other hand, greatly minimizes the disruption these events can have on your IAM objectives, helping you to achieve your goals. The Thales OneWelcome Identity Platform has been designed to complement your existing IAM platform, in a modular fashion, so you can easily replace parts of your IAM ship, leading to smoother sailing through the ocean of identity and access management.

You can discover more about the individual modules you can easily integrate into your existing IAM platform here. Or request a demo by clicking here.

P.S. Coincidentally, Thales is also named after a famous Greek historical figure - Thales of Miletus. Not only was Thales one of the founding figures of Ancient Greece, but he is credited with the saying “Know thyself”. Which makes him almost certainly one of the world’s first IAM pioneers.