Identity and Access Management in 2025: Why it is the Backbone of Digital Trust

As digital ecosystems grow more complex, integrating more and more different services,  Identity and Access Management (IAM) has become central to user trust, data protection, and platform scalability.

But while businesses invest in cloud, APIs, and AI — IAM is often treated as a technical afterthought. In reality, it’s the connective layer between users, business and every digital service.

To explore the evolving role of IAM, I spoke with Mario Thomann, expert for Identity and Accesss Management at Tallence AG, about key trends, common pitfalls, and how to make IAM a growth enabler.

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a framework of policies, tools, and technologies that ensures the right users have the right access to digital services — securely, efficiently, and in compliance with data protection laws. In 2025, IAM is no longer just IT infrastructure — it’s a strategic foundation for trust, user centric personalization, and digital agility. 

But in 2025, it plays a much broader role:
It secures interactions, seamless service integration, cross device use cases, customer insights, regulatory compliance, and personalizes user journeys across industries — from telecom to finance to the public sector.

> Learn more about Tallence’s Customer Identity Management services

Mario:
Today, IAM is the invisible engine behind digital trust. It's the first thing users interact with - whether it's login, consent, or onboarding - and it shapes how secure, seamless, and personalized their experience feels. When IAM works, no one notices it. When it fails, there is no personalization access possible and users leave.

Legacy architectures are one of the biggest blockers.
Many companies still rely on hardcoded, siloed systems that can't scale or support modern UX features like:

• Passwordless login
• Risk-based authentication
• Social login options
• Consent and preference management

Mario:
We often help companies move from monolithic IAM solutions to interoperable,scalebale, and cloud-native identity platforms — decoupled from backend logic and ready for ecosystem growth.

The most innovative organizations treat IAM as a shared service layer that supports:

• CRM and personalization
• Customer support workflows
• Data governance and consent
• Partner and channel integrations

And they use worldwide established standards like OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, and FIDO2 to ensure an easy integration, interoperability, service decoupling, security and future-readiness.

> External Reference: Learn more about OpenID Connect

Digital identity is entering a new era.
In the near future, we will see:

• More and more passwordless authentications
• Decentralized identity (DID) and self-sovereign identity (SSI) models
• Selective disclosure (users decide what to share and with whom) Gibt es eigentlich schon lange im Rahmen von 3rd Party Logins
• Identity wallets integrate a lot of personal documents such as ID cards, driving licenses, certificates and so on. It also will enabling digital signing and pseudonomic authentication with government frameworks (like the EU’s eIDAS 2.0 initiative)

Mario:
The future is about user-controlled identity that still meets enterprise security and compliance needs.

At Tallence AG, we support Europe’s leading telcos and service providers with scalable IAM frameworks — from high-volume OpenID providers handling over 1.4 billion requests per day, to fully modular IAM services for the public sector and multi-partner platforms.

IAM is not just tech — it’s strategy, UX, and trust combined.