In 2008, if you wanted to run a web application, you bought a server. You racked it in a data centre. You hired someone to maintain it. When traffic spiked, you bought another server. When it broke at 3am, someone drove to the data centre with a replacement hard drive.
Then AWS launched. Then Azure. Then Google Cloud. And within a decade, the entire concept of "infrastructure" changed. You didn't buy servers anymore. You consumed infrastructure as a service. It was always available, scaled automatically, and you paid for what you used.
Cloud infrastructure didn't just change technology. It created a new category. It changed how businesses thought about what "building" meant.
Identity is about to go through the same transformation.
The $64 Billion Problem
The global digital identity market sits at an estimated $39-64 billion today. By 2030, it's projected to reach $80-146 billion. Those numbers reflect an industry that's growing fast but remains fundamentally fragmented.
Today, identity verification is a point solution. You need to verify a new hire? You buy a background check. You need to confirm a customer's identity? You run a KYC process. You need to authenticate a user? You implement multi-factor authentication.
Each of these is a separate product, from a separate vendor, solving a separate problem, generating a separate data silo. There's no connective tissue. No shared infrastructure. No universal layer that says "this person is who they claim to be" across every context.
It's as if every company that needed to serve a web page still bought its own physical server. That's where identity is today. Fragmented, expensive, and fundamentally siloed.
Why Identity Systems Are Failing Institutions
Enterprise identity today suffers from five structural problems that point solutions can't fix.
Identity data is siloed. HR has employment records. Security has access control data. Compliance has KYC files. Finance has payment verification. None of these systems talk to each other. The same person exists as five separate identity records across five separate systems, with no unified view.
Identity verification is static. Traditional systems verify identity at a single point in time — onboarding, account creation, contract signing — and then assume that verification holds indefinitely. But identity risk is dynamic. A person's right to work can expire. Their credentials can be revoked. Their risk profile can change. Static systems can't see this.
Verification is one-way. Almost every identity system in use today works in one direction: the institution verifies the individual. But the individual has no way to verify the institution. When someone receives a call from "your bank," there's no mechanism for the individual to confirm that the caller is actually from the bank. This asymmetry is the root cause of an enormous volume of fraud.
Systems are platform-specific. Identity verification is tied to specific channels. Your video call platform has one system. Your physical access control has another. Your recruitment process has a third. There's no verification that works across all of them — in person, on video, over voice, via messaging.
Fraud is networked, but systems treat identities individually. Modern fraud operates as coordinated networks. Synthetic identities, account farms, systematic impersonation. But identity systems evaluate each person in isolation, unable to detect patterns across the network.
These aren't feature gaps. They're architectural limitations. You can't solve them by adding another point solution to the stack.
The Infrastructure Shift
Infrastructure, in the technology sense, has three defining characteristics:
Always available. You don't "turn on" cloud infrastructure for a specific task. It's there, running, ready. Identity infrastructure works the same way. Verification isn't a one-off process you initiate. It's a persistent layer that's always active.
Reliable and universal. Cloud infrastructure works regardless of what you're building on top of it. A healthcare app and a gaming platform use the same underlying compute and storage services. Identity infrastructure should work the same way — the same verification layer for recruitment, access control, compliance, and fraud prevention.
Consumed, not built. Businesses don't build their own cloud infrastructure. They consume it through APIs. Identity should work identically. A business shouldn't need to build verification workflows from scratch. They should consume identity as a service, integrating it into their existing systems through simple, standardised interfaces.
This is what "Identity-as-Infrastructure" means. Not another point solution. Not another verification vendor. A foundational layer that institutions build on top of, the way they build on cloud infrastructure today.
From Point-in-Time to Living Identity
The most significant shift in Identity-as-Infrastructure is the move from static verification to living identity graphs.
A living identity graph doesn't just record that someone was verified on a specific date. It maintains a continuous, evolving picture of that person's identity across every interaction. Each verification event — a right-to-work check, a meeting authentication, a physical access scan — adds to the graph. Over time, the system builds a rich, multi-dimensional identity profile that becomes more reliable with every data point.
This changes what's possible. Instead of asking "was this person verified six months ago?", you can ask "is this person verified right now?" Instead of running the same background check every time someone changes role, the system knows their current status. Instead of treating each verification as an isolated event, the system understands the full pattern of someone's identity interactions.
For institutions, this means identity stops being a cost centre and becomes an intelligence layer. It informs hiring decisions, access policies, risk assessments, and compliance reporting — all from a single, continuously updated source of truth.
Two-Way Trust: The Missing Dimension
Current identity systems verify in one direction: the institution checks the individual. Identity-as-Infrastructure introduces two-way verification. Both parties authenticate before any interaction begins.
This is how trust actually works between humans. When you meet someone in person, both of you assess each other. You both show identification. You both confirm the meeting is legitimate. Digital interactions should work the same way.
Two-way verification eliminates entire categories of fraud. Phishing calls fail because the recipient can verify the caller. Deepfake meetings fail because both participants must authenticate in real time. Impersonation fails because identity is confirmed from both directions simultaneously.
This isn't a feature. It's an architectural principle. And it only works when identity is treated as infrastructure — always on, always available, always verifying in both directions.
Platform Agnostic: One Layer, Every Channel
The final characteristic of true identity infrastructure is that it works everywhere. Not just on video calls. Not just at physical access points. Not just during onboarding. Everywhere.
In person. On a video call. Over the phone. Via text message. On WhatsApp. At a building entrance. At a construction site. In a care home. At a recruitment event.
One identity layer. One verification mechanism. One audit trail. Every channel.
This is what makes it infrastructure rather than a product. Products solve specific problems in specific contexts. Infrastructure provides a universal foundation that any application, any workflow, and any interaction can build on.
What Comes Next
The companies that defined cloud infrastructure — AWS, Azure, Google Cloud — didn't just build better servers. They created a new category that changed how every business thought about technology.
Identity-as-Infrastructure will do the same for trust. The businesses that adopt it first won't just have better verification. They'll have a structural advantage in how they hire, how they manage risk, how they comply with regulation, and how they build relationships with customers, employees, and partners.
The question isn't whether identity will become infrastructure. The market trajectory, the regulatory pressure, and the fraud landscape all point in the same direction. The question is which institutions will build on it first.
If you want to understand how Certifyd is building the identity infrastructure layer for enterprises, learn more about our vision or get in touch.