It’s hard to overlook recent large-scale cloud service outages. Massive incidents affecting providers like AWS, Azure, and Cloudflare disrupted large swaths of the internet and brought down websites and services that many other systems depend on. The resulting ripple effect brought down the applications and workflows that many organizations rely on on a daily basis.
For consumers, these outages are often perceived as an inconvenience, such as not being able to order food, stream content, or access online services. But the implications for businesses are far more severe. When an airline’s reservation system goes offline, seat availability is lost, leading directly to lost revenue, reputational damage, and flight disruptions.
These incidents highlight that cloud outages affect more than just computing and networking. One of the most important and influential areas is identity. When authentication and authorization are disrupted, the consequences include more than just downtime. This is a core operational and security incident.
Cloud infrastructure, shared points of failure
Cloud providers are not identity systems. However, modern identity architectures rely heavily on cloud-hosted infrastructure and shared services. Even if the authentication service itself continues to function, failures elsewhere in the dependency chain can make the identity flow unusable.
Most organizations rely on cloud infrastructure for critical identity-related components, including:
Datastore policies and authorization data that holds identity attributes and directory information Load balancer, control plane, DNS
These shared dependencies pose risks to the system. If any of these fail, authentication or authorization can be completely blocked, even though the identity provider is technically still running. The result is a hidden single point of failure. Unfortunately, many organizations are only discovered when a failure occurs.
Identity, the gatekeeper of everything
Authentication and authorization are not isolated functions used only at login time, but are continuous gatekeepers for all systems, APIs, and services. Modern security models, especially Zero Trust, are built on the principle of “never trust, always verify.” That verification is entirely dependent on the availability of an identity system.
This applies equally to human user and machine identities. Applications always authenticate. The API approves all requests. Services obtain tokens to call other services. If the identity system is not available, nothing will work.
Therefore, ID outages directly threaten business continuity. It must provide proactive monitoring and alerting across all dependent services to trigger the highest level of incident response. Treating ID downtime as a secondary issue or a purely technical problem greatly underestimates its impact.
The hidden complexity of authentication flows
As organizations move to a passwordless model, authentication involves more than validating a username and password or passkey. A single authentication event typically triggers a complex series of operations behind the scenes.
Identity systems generally include:
Resolve user attributes from a directory or database Store session state Issue access tokens with scopes, claims, and attributes Perform detailed authorization decisions using the policy engine
Authorization checks may occur both at the time the token is issued and at runtime when accessing the API. APIs often need to authenticate themselves and obtain a token before calling other services.
Each of these steps varies depending on the underlying infrastructure. Data stores, policy engines, token stores, and external services all become part of the authentication flow. A failure in any of these components can completely block access and impact users, applications, and business processes.
Why traditional high availability is not enough
High availability is widely implemented and absolutely necessary, but it is often insufficient for identity systems. Most high availability designs focus on regional failover, or deploying a primary in one region and a secondary in another region. If one region fails, traffic moves to the backup.
This approach does not work if the failure affects shared or global services. Regional failover provides little protection when identity systems in multiple regions rely on the same cloud control plane, DNS provider, or managed database service. In these scenarios, the backup system fails for the same reasons as the primary system.
As a result, identity architectures that appear resilient on paper collapse under large-scale cloud or platform-wide outages.
Design identity system resiliency
True resilience must be intentionally designed. For identity systems, this often means reducing dependence on a single provider or failure domain. Approaches may include a multi-cloud strategy or controlled on-premises alternatives that are accessible even when cloud services degrade.
Equally important is having a plan in place if your behavior deteriorates. Denying access completely during an outage will have the greatest impact on your business. Granting limited access based on cached attributes, precomputed authorization decisions, or functional limitations can significantly reduce operational and reputational damage.
Not all identity-related data requires the same level of availability. Some attributes or authorization sources may be less fault tolerant than others, but that may be acceptable. The key is to make these tradeoffs intentionally, based on business risk rather than architectural convenience.
Identity systems must be designed to fail gracefully. When an infrastructure outage is unavoidable, access controls should degrade predictably rather than completely collapse.
Ready to get started with a robust identity management solution? Try Curity Identity Server for free.
Source link
