Thoughts for the month

While we have not yet crossed the summer equinox, summer is now underway. This means conferences such as Identiverse, are coming up this week (for the latest in the identity space). The two areas that appear to be of primary focus is passkeys and AI. Unlike in years past, M&A integration does not appear to be touched.

While passkeys are interesting, any impact that I would expect is the forced reregistration into your solution (if you have one) while also being very leery of any “roll your own implementation.

It is worth noting that the AI discussions will be something I will be keeping an eye on and how it will impact current and future acquisitions. Beyond the obvious of performing code analysis (where I would express caution if relying on any of the frontier tools) and scripting out the data migration tooling (similar level of caution, but for other reasons), is accounting for not just the PoC projects, but the shadow IT and even some of the production uses of the agentic world.

Given the speed the tech is moving, there are several pieces at play when it comes to the risk perspective: Shadow IT of employees passing their credentials to their agents Growing prevalence of agents that require permission to act on the end user (or role’s behalf) New forms of API management for your customers or partners that have their own agents And this is before we add in the changing pricing models for your vendors or look at a model either being subjected to additional access restrictions or out right removal. The biggest example from last weekend is what happened with Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos release.

If you have your list of pre-acquisition questions, then these will need to be added once you have determined the state of their AI experimentation.

Don’t have the checklist? Then lets see why.

List updates

I finally got around to getting the previous posts put into the archives and will have future posts automatically find their way to both places. What this means is that there is a possibility of duplicate emails going out. I am planning for this to be next week on June 21st, and will send out two emails: one for the initial cutover, and a second in the new world.

There should be no action on your part, but if you end up missing any of the two emails (or retrieve too many), then do let me know by replyig to this note (or the next one).

Take care and stay cool! Chris