Imagine you are the IT administrator of a large company running operations across geographies. The organization maintains its own data centers and servers spread across locations.
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Over years, a mishmash of identity directories and stores developed as various teams built applications independently. This includes cloud apps like Salesforce for CRM, multiple regional Azure Active Directories for user authentication, and more. As users leverage these apps daily, their profiles, access permissions and credentials get fragmented across different stores.
But now management asks you to analyze:
- -How many total user profiles exist across the entire IT infrastructure?
- -What is the duplication of user identities across stores?
- -What are the out-of-control access rights setting up security gaps?
Answering these basic identity questions needed for governance and audit can take weeks of tedious research across disconnected systems.
Clearly there needs to be a better way towards one source of truth for identities. Given the growing risk of insider security threats and cyber attacks, consolidating the access management chaos is imperative.
Technology to federate existing identity stores to derive one amalgamated representation for users, files and devices across the sprawl seems to be the need of the hour. Analysts believe identity federation and analytics tools will be an emerging priority for CIOs looking to further secure their complex hybrid environments in the coming years.
The Path Ahead: While this paints a complex dilemma, CIOs specializing in identity management recommend a systematic approach focused on the following solutions:
Federated Identity Fabric: Implement an integration platform that breaks identity data silos to drive convergence. Leading tools can link Active Directories, LDAP systems, databases and cloud applications under one identity federation layer. This creates golden source records consolidating user, credential and access permissions across environments.
Entitlement Reporting: Leverage identity analytics with prebuilt reports to trim excess access rights and suspicious system access associated with identities. Reviews of entitlement risks, duplicate profiles and inactive users simplify clean up needs.
Automated Governance: Deploy centralized access management policies for identity lifecycles and provisioning. Embedded controls save administrators manual processes as changes propagate across integrated stores automatically.
According to IDC Analyst, Marie Duncan, “As hybrid ecosystems grow, CIOs need to consider identity consolidation platforms that can uniformly manage and optimize profiles, credentials, access permissions spanning their stack.” Specialized identity vendors focused on next-gen IAM solutions can hugely simplify the path ahead.
Watch this video about the Optimal IdM Virtual Identity Server to learn more, then reach out to Optimal IdM to evaluate capabilities that can federate your identity fabric into one coherent entity.
