Roland Baum is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of umbrella.associates GmbH, a boutique consultancy near Frankfurt for digital identities and the protection of critical infrastructure. As a cybersecurity and IT architect, he brings many years of experience in information security, complex system landscapes, and zero trust strategies, with a focus on identity and access management (IAM) and fine-grained authorization — expertise he has applied for public sector and enterprise clients.

He currently serves as Technical Architect at FITKO, Germany’s Federal IT Cooperation Agency, where he works on the identity infrastructure underpinning public administration. He is an active contributor to the OpenID Foundation’s AuthZEN Working Group, focusing on standardized externalized authorization.

Roland holds the CISSP, CISA, and CIDPRO® certifications and speaks regularly on zero trust, externalized authorization, and identity for regulated and enterprise environments.