The future of digital identity: DNA, AI and blockchains

[MUSIC PLAYING] My name is Alan Radford. I'm a privileged access management field strategist for One Identity. I've been here about 13 years, 25 years in the industry. So one of the things that we recently learned is that projections indicate by 2025, there'll be 175 zettabytes of data out on the internet. And a zettabyte is a billion terabytes. So this is a lot of data. And it's no secret that we live in a digital age. We're shopping online. We're dating online. We're working online. We're living our professional and personal lives in the digital space. And it got me thinking. One of the things that I've done in my personal life is to go out and track my family tree. And as part of that, I did a DNA test to see where my origins are, Germanic, bit of Irish, that kind of thing. And other people can collaborate, and then you start tracking your family tree. And it made available to me my DNA. I asked them for a copy of it. So I've actually got a copy, a text file, of my DNA. It's 1 and 1/2 megabytes. So I've got a raw text file of my DNA. And I thought, OK, why would I want this? What possible use could this have? And so I opened it, and I looked through it. And I thought, you know what? This looks a lot like an encryption key. This looks a lot like a cipher. With the research that we've been doing into non-human identities, artificial Intelligence, the proliferation of AI, which is still in its early stages, to the point where a lot of organizations are still sitting back and saying to themselves, well, let's see what our competition do with this. Let's see what the rest of the industry does with this in the wider world. And it suddenly dawned on me that there is a big difference between us as humans and a non-human identity. A non-human identity does not have DNA. We do. So what would happen if you were to take your DNA, put it into a blockchain, and start tying it to things like your Facebook photos, for example? If I create some AI, deepfake photos of you and that's not coming from your DNA verified blockchain, that's one way to protect your digital identity. And then that sort of ties into the whole topic of, well, in the far flung future, which may be closer than we think, when I go and apply for a job, for example-- I'm very happy here at One Identity, I might add. But if I was to go and apply for a job, I might literally bring my own identity with me. That blockchain of identity that ties back to my DNA, so it's verified to be me, might include things like my work history, might even go so far as to include reference ability. It might also include some of my online activity, what kind of things I'm into. Some of those things might be behavioral trends that might indicate risk. I might look at risky things online that might be actually tracked, or the shopping habits that I have. So this data gathering is already happening. It's already being used to enrich sales processes, marketing processes, and so on. And so when we get to a world, to a point where the quanta of our identity is ourselves, we've passed the point where, on this video, me having to convince you that I'm real. We're now reaching a point where, potentially, when I'm in the same room, I might have to convince you that I'm real. Because if I turn up, and I'm not tied to Alan Radford's identity, then that's one way to invalidate a fake impersonator. So those are some of the things that have been top of my mind recently. And I think it's going to be very interesting to see what the coming years hold. In terms of the industry we're in, here at One Identity, we've been consolidating IGA, PAM, and access management for a decade. And now we've got lots of other organizations around the world now playing catch-up in terms of IGA vendors acquiring PAM, PAM vendors acquiring IGA, so on and so forth. And we're leading the way. And they're sort of in our wake, trailing behind us. It stands out to me that , that consolidation is not over. There's a wider market at play here, ITDR, SIEM, GRC, all of it. So the identity fabric, as it were, I think is doing the opposite of what personal identity is doing, which is consolidating. In an earlier presentation, I was talking about the expanding universe. Well, the identity fabric is expanding in scope, it's now going beyond IGA. It's now going beyond PAM. And that is going to continue to expand until the promised land, being one single cybersecurity fabric that keeps the entire environment secure. In an ideal world, I'd like to see that sort of thing wrap around individual identity. [MUSIC PLAYING]