"Help me, Identity Verification; you're my only hope." For years, IAM programs have promised seamless, secure user journeys, yet many practitioners find themselves trapped in a "data swamp." We've talked about "Identity-First" incessantly for years, but the realization of that vision remains elusive due to "asteroid fields" of messy HCM integrations, unverified human attributes, and a neglected fleet of automated actors.

If your organization is still struggling to make the dream of automated IAM a reality, this session is your rebellion against the chaos. It will address the pain points that stall progress across both human and non-human actors:

• "It's a [de-provisioning] Trap!": Risk reporting that replaces actual de-provisioning.
• Onboarding Latency: Manual overhead and increased service tickets caused by poor data quality.
• The Droid Dilemma: "These aren't the droids you're looking for"—because you don't actually know which machine is which.
• The Service Desk Vulnerability: Social engineering at its finest...the critical security gap where service desk agents reset a user's factors based on unverified trust.

This session moves beyond the "why" of transformation and focuses on the how of realization. It will demonstrate how moving verification to the front of the lifecycle acts as the ultimate catalyst—turning identity data from a liability into a high-fidelity asset.

Beyond the organic, this session will explore why machine identities (Droids) need identification just as much as their organic counterparts. Realizing this vision requires tight partnerships with engineering teams, embracing a DevOps mindset so that identity is embedded as Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Next, the session will showcase how to identify and verify these droids using modern standards like SPIFFE with SVIDs, enabling teams to bake verifiable workload identities directly into the CI/CD pipelines and maintain a unified, cryptographically-verifiable registry.

By joining this rebellion, attendees will gain the tactical schematics for:

• Verification as the Foundation: Discover how "Identity-First" verification restores balance to your downstream business processes.
• The Droid Registry: High-level strategies for identifying machine identities using SPIFFE to eliminate "shadow" workloads.
• The DevOps Alliance: Strategies for partnering with engineering teams to implement identity as Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
• Operational ROI: Real-world examples of how clean, verified data leads to the realization of automated provisioning and slashing service desk tickets.
• The End State: Using Verifiable Credentials and workload identities to finally phase out traditional MFA and address PAM concerns.
• The Kessel Run: A look at how Verifiable Credentials (VCs) and continuous verification can propel your workforce into a passwordless future faster than 12 parsecs.

Join the rebellion to discover how building verified identities from the start is the only hope to move your IAM program out of the planning phase and into a high-speed realization of modern security—faster than the ship that made the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs!