Readibots: An Agile Solution for IAM Challenges

Complexities of IAM

Imagine your provisioning system had to move 1000 employees a week in and out of all your systems to the tune of millions of operations every year. Do you think it could handle it? Not just cloud stuff – that’s cheating. The system must touch everything an employee would use, including anything that may live in on-prem systems. If that sounds hard, let’s try another one. Imagine you had 6000 organizations which all have independent IT lives (i.e. 6000 directories, 6000 role & group structures, 6000 different mixes of applications, 6000 sets of entitlements, etc.). Now imagine you are compelled through regulation to show you’re managing these effectively as one. Yes, just like the last one you have systems in cloud, on-prem, and everything in between, but now you have 6000 different combinations that have all grown up organically independently from one another. Could your current automation handle that?

Readibots is doing that today, and it’s pretty impressive. At least it impressed me. Let’s explore how.

Readibots: Agile Identity Approach with a Practical Solution

First, a brief overview of the tech. The platform is deceptively simple. The focus is on making the solution practical. I say “practical” to place this on the scale of impossible, implausible, and impractical problems. Readibots has an approach that bridges the practicality gap – which is the hardest part. There’s a cloud-native platform at the center to provide all the core services. Cloud scale and connectivity was one of the pieces that had been missing in the past. Scheduling, permissions, metadata, and all the other things that form the command and control functions all live in this cloud layer which makes them accessible wherever it’s needed. But Readibots is not only a cloud solution. Everything Readibots can do can also be brought on-prem and into your data centers. There are agents (which they call proxies) which will run in the local environment and coordinate with the central command in the cloud to execute what’s needed where it’s needed. 

But what is it that allows the scaling these two customers are seeing? How do you go from IGAs tripping over their own feet to the practical power which achieves that throughput? It is good to note that both the company with 1000 joiners and leavers a week and the company with 6000 organizations already have IGA solutions in place. So their issue wasn’t that they didn’t have any platforms spanning their systems. The issue is that those platforms could not provide the agility, the flexibility, to solve these problems. The dirty secret of identity is that it’s very messy. It’s a technical solution to people problems, and people are always messy. Readibots gives you the ability to get your hands dirty. It has the flex you get from scripting but gives you the means to coordinate those flexes at massive scales and in scaled-up, parallel ways. It’s the compromise between the scripting IAM professionals have been using to patch up their platforms’ flaws for decades and the coordinated scale demanded by the types of problems the ever-complexifying IT world keeps producing as it scales up. Harnessing the scripting-like power is how Readibots achieves this practicality which gets their customers these high-scale results. 

Technical people love the elegance of solving complex problems like these, but if the solution is practical at a technical level can it also claim to be practical at a business level? Of course, the answer is yes. These things are intimately connected. The organization with 6000 parts considered their fines a part of doing business. They didn’t think they could make the fines go away with any technical solution without spending even more money than the fines cost. Readibots showed them otherwise. Similarly, the company with 1000s of people moving in and out was at the edge of their systems collapsing when they found Readibots. Their projections were having to double teams that were doing the provisioning essentially by hand. They are a service provider which essentially allows others to outsource their staffing complexities to them so adding that friction to scaling was a threat to their core business. Now they are hiring people to build systems on Readibots to let them keep growing their business, which is possible because of the practical power they now have. 

When my client asked me to look into Readibots, I thought it would be an easy, fun assignment. Kevin Foisy, the founder & CEO, and David Bullas, their VP, Sales Engineering, as both are old friends. With Identiverse 2024 coming up at the time, this provided an easy way to get together with people I would want to see anyway, and also do some legit work. I did not expect to find what Readibots is doing. I maybe expected an updated set of connectors and some neat new out-of-the-box workflows. Bridging the practicality gap for identity systems is no small thing. Giving you the capability to scale identity at the growth curve and pace of your business has been the promise of IGA systems for a long time. Turns out maybe they were never up to the job. That’s no shock to the people who have been writing the scripts to make up for their flaws. What may be a shock to folks like that is seeing that now there is a better way.