We’ve heard about the portability of a lot of things. If you have a 401k you can take it with you when you change employers. Your mobile phone number is portable and can be transferred from one carrier to another when you change plans. Some things are more portable than others. A laptop is fairly portable, but an iPad is even more portable because of its size and weight. When we think of identity management, however, we may not consider it to be too portable. We tend to think of only managing identities where they reside and that’s typically behind a firewall. But, the market has moved beyond providing internal application access to only internal users. We now have situations where internal access is needed by external users and external access to applications is needed by internal users.
These access scenarios create a number of challenges for companies who must look beyond their firewall to manage identities hosted in the cloud or in another repository somewhere within the corporate network. Secure access to resources and applications scattered between the enterprise network and the cloud is quickly becoming the norm at many companies. Companies who are faced with these challenging identity management scenarios quickly find out just how portable their identity management solution is.
For some companies who have implemented older identity management systems, they may have difficulty adapting their solution to include cloud-based apps. There are problems with vintage identity management solutions. By vintage, I mean those IAM solutions that don’t work in the cloud and those solutions that provide a very rigid set of features designed to support a very specific application or set of applications. You will find that integrating new applications with legacy IAM systems to be very difficult and costly. The solution to adding new applications requires changes to the application itself and the client software. Client software is typically “brittle” meaning that it’s easily broken when modifications are required. Adding new applications to be supported by a vintage IAM solution can take weeks to months for developers to build the code to support them.
The idea of portable identity and access management means your IAM solution can be extended across multiple user types and across multiple infrastructures. For example, you may be a smaller company that has adopted a number of cloud apps to handle various aspects of your business such as payroll, HR, customer management, and so on. You also have a workforce that is using Active Directory and that is your central repository for managing all users and their access. Rather than having to manage user access and multiple user stores in the cloud and behind your firewall you want a common user store to manage all users. If a change is made behind the firewall to a user, you want that change effective outside the network as well. A portable identity management system allows you the flexibility to have your user reside wherever you want.
I believe that with your identities in the cloud, you shouldn’t be forced to compromise between the cloud and the enterprise. That’s why Symplified provides a complete feature-rich platform that includes all the necessary components you need to realize a portable identity and access management solution. These components include single sign-on, access management, user management, and audit. Without a complete IAM solution you may find that as your needs change and your business moves towards the cloud, that you’re left to choose between the cloud and the enterprise and duplicate access in multiple locations. That’s not the direction I believe most companies want to in. Simplicity is the buzzword of today’s IT administrators and users.
