I Helped Build the First 3 Eras of Identity. Here's What the Fourth Era Demands
Rubrik, Tuesday, August 18th, 2026
Rubrik's Eric Olden traces three prior eras of identity and argues AI is the fourth, with its answer still unwritten.
Eric Olden argues every era of identity starts the same way: the perimeter moves, the old method of proving who someone is stops working, and organizations spend a decade catching up.
He traces three prior eras he helped build at Securant, Symplified and Strata. The web broke the assumption that you could only trust identities you issued yourself, which produced SAML; SaaS broke the assumption that applications lived inside the firewall, forcing single sign-on to become a federated service; and multi-cloud broke the assumption of one system to standardize on, producing an abstraction layer across silos.
Each era's technology is still in production, so the stack accumulates rather than retires. AI is the fourth era, and this post opens a series on what it demands.