Gartner expects enterprises will face emerging decentralized identity impact and potential Web3 business model disruption in the identity and access management (IAM) space this year.

“[The] IAM space is now more and more like a multiverse,” Homan Farahmand, VP analyst at Gartner, told SDxCentral during a preview of his keynote address at the Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit. “Whenever we have this major innovation in any networking or computing technologies, it usually spins off a new universe of IAM technologies and practices.”

In the "Web2" universe, cloud computing split the web between on-premises and cloud tools and technologies. “With the introduction of blockchain as a new operating system for decentralized computing, which has already given us decentralized identity, ... is very different from what we currently have in Web2 type of setup,” Farahmand said.

“The reality is that we're living in a kind of period where all of these universes have to coexist and in some cases they collide with each other and create more confusion,” he added.

Web2 delivers business functions using a platform-centric approach, which centralized the control of applications, identities, and data in the platform. Web3 delivers this in the form of decentralized data and fewer protocols.

“Decentralized identity plays a key role in Web3 because users can attach their identity wallet to these data-less protocols and inject personal data to complete the transaction or interaction as intended,” Farahmand said.

Gartner defines decentralized identity as an alternative to centralized IAM architectures by using cybersecurity technologies such as blockchain to allow an entity to create and control its own digital identity and establish trust in identities and resilience within the overall system. Identity wallet software is one of the key components of decentralized identity and the broader cybersecurity ecosystem.

Farahmand likened identity wallets in Web3 to internet browsers in Web2, which is a point of entry. “Currently we have multi-purpose, proprietary wallets. … So our goal is to achieve a standardized universal wallet, pretty much going through the same evolution that internet browsers did.” From a control protocol perspective, that means interoperating Web2 and Web3 protocols.

“Decentralized identity will enable or basically will enhance the efficiency, privacy, and security in our systems,” he said. “Having full decentralization is an aspiration but the end goal is to maximize that in each component of decentralized identity, but that's a journey.”

On top of the accelerated decentralized identity adoptions, Farahmand also forecasts artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled controls will drive the formalization of identity data engineering and hyperautomation will bolster advancements in the fields of non-human identities including machine, legal entity, and organization identities.

Building the Digital Decentralized Identity Ecosystem

Farahmand noted it's important for emerging technologies to go mainstream is building an ecosystem.

Currently, major vendors have their own digital wallets with different technology, which forces users to have multiple wallets. “But eventually I think they will converge one way or another to enable that seamless communication between different trust infrastructures, services, and also identity wallets,” he said.

Last year, the Linux Foundation formed the Open Wallet Foundation (OWF) to support the development of open source digital wallets.

“We see some resistance in terms of the antitrust type of issues that are coming up with some of the major vendors [who] have the proprietary approach,” Farahmand said. “So I think over time, it will see convergence … and it's going to drive a lot of innovation in this space.”