I enjoyed reading Martin Kuppinger’s response to Ian Glazer’s challenge, “Killing Identity Management in Order to Save it.” I tend to align with Martin’s conclusion as a pragmatic approach:

I do not believe in disruptiveness. I believe in approaches that build on existing investments. IAM has to change, no doubt about that. But there will still be a lot of “old school” IAM together with the “new school” parts. Time and time again it has been proven that change without a migration path is an invitation to disaster. Embrace and extend is the classical migration methodology for classical technical transformative strategies.

There is no question that we need continued innovation in Identity and Access Management.  There are new business problems to conquer, new size requirements to scale, new user expectations to master.  But let’s recognize that current systems have also conquered many problems and achieved beneficial levels of effectiveness. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.