For those of you responsible somehow for the security of your company’s network and information stores, your job never ends. You are placed between two points of diminishing returns between authentic users and the rest of the world: hackers, competitors, prior employees, and list goes on.
I compare your job to one I previously had working in product development for one of the leading automotive manufacturers in engine electronics. Our trade offs were performance, fuel economy and air quality.
It was a complex triangle and one where none of the end points were ever fully satisfied. Compromise was always the present state and even on the best days, with faster CPU’s and new technologies the Future State was also a compromised result.
Drivers want to put their foot down and feel the world fly past just like in The Fast And The Furious. On the other hand, to meet the EPA’s requirements we had to de-tune performance so that air quality standards could be met and fuel economy standards could be achieved. No one was ever completely happy.
The Identity and Access Management world is much the same.
Users want a single click to get into all that is theirs and yours, but hate to be slowed down by multi-authentication, password expiration notices, password resets, and all the other roadblocks you put in the way to keep unauthorized users out of the network.
This is the space where our IDMWORKS engineers and consultants live everyday and we are damn good at it.
An example of how we pull it all together is our recent work with a large health care organization. This customer faced multiple challenges – including migrating away from OpenNetwork Directory Smart Access platform, decommissioning Tivoli Directory Server, and displacing a non-performing SI.
IDMWORKS’ solution was to create a centralization of Au & Az Framework using OAM, to create mobile enablement with STS, plant OID as the central identity repository and OIM for user management and centralized provisioning.
Today’s challenges met…onto tomorrow’s!