Modern organisations face an array of challenges around user & rights management, with most organisations now using hybrid systems, on premises, hosted, SaaS systems and more, the role of creating accounts, user life-cycle management and rights management is becoming ever more complex to manage and police.
Identity Management (IDM) has been around for over 20 years and it should be a no-brainer that it is more relevant than ever before for modern hybrid IT systems especially as most organisations have now realised that the only way to improve efficiency and reduce human error in IT is automation, something IDM excels at.
So why is isn’t there a modern renaissance for IDM? Well quietly there is, more and more products are coming with very basic built-in IDM configurations and most products support Single Sign-On (SSO) via one or more methods. There is also the rise of the cloud IDM providers such as Okta and Auth0 (to name but two) who provide a mix of IDM, SSO & Access Management.
This is all very positive but there are drawbacks, having lots of different products each with their own IDM settings is very decentralised, this makes it not only harder to manage but harder to monitor and troubleshoot. Cloud IDM providers are very easy to use but their templated approach tends to be restrictive unless you need them to do exactly what they provide.
The logical step up in centralised IDM for most organisations is Microsoft Identity Management (MIM) however unless you want to do a significant amount of bespoke coding you can end up with MIM only managing the basics.
Other IDM systems like Micro Focus’ IDM are extremely powerful and will allow you to automate nearly any scenario, however, we often find organisations have deskilled over time and have not kept these systems up to date, in fact it’s quite common to come across organisations with a mix of Micro Focus IDM, MIM, Cloud IDM and bespoke in-house created scripts, not the centralisation that is ideally needed.
At ST-FOUR we help companies make sense of their IT systems, we can help you evaluate your current IT estate, User workflows & Lifecycles and can help you put together your perfect IDM solution either from scratch or by making best use of your existing investments.