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Nowadays we often see an increasing business requirements to promote the integration between their applications. I’ve seen that happening a lot in the construction, education and health industries where integration and collaboration are essential to enhance an increase in productivity, but it is happening across all industries.

Identity, productivity and management are converging and with customers moving to cloud, hybrid identity is the new control plane for the enterprise allowing users to access applications with a single identity.

 Identity is the peace that is common across productivity tools and apps, be it on-premise or cloud apps.

Identity and Access Management is also the key to work more effectively with remote employees, external partners and across business units. However, all too often this leads to an increase of business risks and challenges due to:

• isolated technology initiatives being deployed to solve point in time issues
• inadequate planning and identity strategy, as well as,
• ineffective controls in managing the internal and external identities to ensure privacy and legal and regulatory requirements.

An Identity and Access Management solution should:

• Be business-driven,
• Provide real business value with concrete benefits by reducing cost and improving productivity
• Improve awareness to the business, resulting in reduced dependence on support with facilities like automated workflows, self-service portals and delegated administration.
• Be able to reduce the business risk, eliminating multiple identity stores and multiple administration points, providing a single administration point and the ability to present multiple data views from a single identity store, reducing replication and synchronization while providing Single Sign-On, Security and compliance fulfillment

Identity and Productivity

To be successful in their work employees need an efficient and intuitive way to access the business applications and better collaborate, while the business needs to ensure that collaboration is taking place within the bounds of internal and external regulations, business policy, process and security.

Identity in an End-to-End Scenario

Inside the corporate network users can access all the applications they need. But how can they have access when they’re not at work?

A successful Identity Management solution should allow for end-to-end scenarios that complement business technology investments.  It should allow the business to grant or block users access to sensitive applications to/from outside their physical boundaries. It should also enable users and partners to access corporate business applications which could be hosted outside or inside the corporate network in a selective and secure way.

With public cloud adoption sky rocking, the organizations need to ensure that cloud integration scenarios are in place as users expect to work from anywhere, on devices of their choice and they require access to business critical applications which could be hosted on premises or in the cloud.

Also, integrated with a client management solution, it should allow the business to block access to corporate resources when users leave the organization and/or when users’ devices are lost or stolen and the management of application access and application grant/removal access through.

Identity and Security

Identity Management solutions should address risks to critical assets by enhancing and expanding the available protections for enterprise identity. It needs to ensure it is resilient to attacks and aligns with the business security requirements. It also must identify the key components of identity management and provide effective procedures to manage security across the environment. It does not matter if it is an on-premises, a hybrid or a public cloud deployment.

The Identity Management architecture should aid as a model, be real-world, effective, consistent and manageable. It should address security, audit, confidentiality, compliance, monitoring and integrity with a centralized Identity Management repository.

Identity Strategy

The Identity strategy should be used to redesign processes and workflows, identify opportunities for automation and correct control weaknesses.

An Identity strategy can enable you to overcome challenges like

• Improving Operational Efficiency (Data/application availability, permissions, password resets)
• Reducing Security Risks (A good percentage of users recycle old passwords while others still writing them down)
• Meeting Regulation Requirements (Implementing business process/policies to meet regulations)
• Enabling Business Objectives (Improving relations with partners/customers and driving business decisions closer to LBDM’s)

Business strategy pinpoints:

–        Understanding the objectives of the Identity Management solution

–        Understanding the success criteria alongside which initiatives will be measured

–        Overall business benefits anticipated, such as enhanced process, improved service delivery and productivity and cost reduction

–        Inherent risks of the strategy, which are often related to reengineering the business processes that requires organizational changes (culturally and politically)

–        Cross-organizational cooperation to implement the strategy

–        Multi-Factor Authentication due to security requirements

–        Application Integration

–        Analytics

–        Reporting

What are Microsoft’s three major investment areas for the Identity Manager vNext release? 

• Hybrid scenarios that leverage cloud-based services delivered in Microsoft Azure, including Multi-Factor Authentication, Azure Active Directory application integration, analytics and reporting
• Support for the latest platforms and mobile devices with modern user interfaces
• Improved security with additional controls, analytics and auditing of administrative and privileged user identities and their access to Active Directory, Windows Server and applications

Microsoft Identity Management benefits

• Common identity. Simplify identity lifecycle management with automated workflows, business rules and easy integration with heterogeneous platforms across the datacenter and cloud. Automate identity and group provisioning based on business policy and implement workflow-driven provisioning through a single interface. Extend MIM to support new scenarios through the Visual Studio and .NET development environments.
• Enable users. Allow users to self-remediate identity issues, including group membership, smart card and password reset functions. An easy-to-use interface delivers increased productivity and satisfaction
• Protect data. Discover and map permissions across multiple systems to individual, assignable roles. Use role mining tools to discover permission sets for users across the enterprise to be later modeled and applied centrally. Increase visibility into compliance and the security state of systems across the organization with in-depth auditing and reporting
• Unify access. The Identity solution should reduce the number of usernames and passwords needed to login. Ensure admin accounts are only going where they need to go and doing what they need to do. Groups can automatically update their membership to ensure only the right people have access to your resources

Don’t wait. Get started now. Let me know how can I help you. I am looking forward to a broad and deep discussion with your business. If this is something I can help your organization then please reach me out at ac@cloudtidings.com, @cloudtidings or leave a comment here