The proliferation of SaaS apps and mobile devices makes network security an increasingly complex challenge. Your employees and partners now have unprecedented levels of access to your organization, often from outside the physical boundaries of the enterprise. That means your perimeter security won't cut it anymore – identities have become the new perimeter.
Not only is the number of users increasing, they demand convenient access to content and apps from anywhere, at any time, on any device. Meeting those demands is difficult enough. Doing so without putting security at risk represents an enormous challenge. There are several steps your IT organization can take to successfully leverage the open enterprise and grow your business in a safe and secure manner.
The new open enterprise makes managing user identities and entitlements more difficult than in the past. Robust perimeter security used to be sufficient. Now, the increasing number of users—many of whom have been granted excessive privileges—creates an entirely new set of vulnerabilities that can be more easily exploited from remote locations than ever before.
Among the immediate identity management challenges facing your IT organization is determining how to:
As the keepers of the keys, IT organizations have traditionally chosen identity management solutions that make their jobs easier—without giving much consideration to their impact on business users. But, by delivering an inconvenient and inefficient user experience, IT could be hindering business productivity and growth.
The ideal solution creates a bridge between IT and the business, creating a convenient, intuitive "one-stop shop" for business users to obtain services and information from the identity management system.
Business Users – Business-Focused
IT Users – Technology-Focused
As apps have moved to the cloud, and user identities have become dispersed across disparate systems, managing identities and access has become more challenging. The days of managing internal users who only have access to a limited number of enterprise systems and apps are over. The new model requires flexibility, automation and a business-orientation that are beyond the capabilities of most existing identity management solutions.
Effective identity management and governance in the open enterprise must address:
The open enterprise has greatly complicated the process of managing users and their access across different populations, as well as across on-premise and cloud applications. To provide a unified and comprehensive approach, this process must be treated as a lifecycle – beginning with onboarding and ending with the termination of the user's employment.
Factors that separate a leadership solution from a merely adequate one includes:
Simplified Identity Management and Governance Lifecyle
Requesting access to applications or role assignments can be a painful process. Being forced to communicate in "IT-speak" rather than business terms and models makes things all the worse. Users need to be able to easily request access in an intuitive and understandable fashion. An effective access request system must provide:
Meanwhile, the absence of an intuitive, automated request tracking and approval system can waste managers' valuable time. Inflexible workflow processes can further hinder your organization's ability to support its dynamic business needs.
You need access tracking capabilities that provide:
Access certification is a pain – but it's necessary in order to validate compliance with policy and regulations.
But, simply eliminating spreadsheets and manual processes isn't enough – certification campaigns need to be highly flexible and oriented towards the needs of the business.
You need certification capabilities that support all of these types of campaigns:
It is true that a simple certification ("Should this user have access to this resource?") often requires additional contextual information to help managers certify access accurately. For example, how frequently a user has accessed a resource, the last time of access, or suspected improper access rights can be highlighted to help make better, faster certification decisions.
As your organization expands, roles and entitlements can start to overlap and proliferate. And as "entitlement creep" occurs, policy violations and overall risks abound. Risk analytics can provide key information to help you identify and remediate these threats quickly.
These analytics can be static (such an offline role discovery and analysis process) or real-time (highlight segregation of duties violations at the time of assignment). A comprehensive approach to identity risk should include both approaches.
Good identity analytics help minimize risk by enabling you to:
To improve user productivity and satisfaction, your identity management solution must successfully engage the business user with an experience that is intuitive and convenient. That means:
Business managers need a similarly convenient process to track and act on their employees' access requests. And your system must interact with them in concepts and terms that are familiar to them.
The trick is to provide the convenience and ease-of-use that business users demand without sacrificing the robust capabilities that help your IT team meet its obligation to ensure security and efficiency. Capabilities such as deep provisioning, risk analysis, identity analytics and complete identity lifecycle management are all critical in the dynamic identity environment of today's complex, open enterprise.
A look inside an ideal access request process. An intuitive "Shopping Cart" allows users to:
The CA Identity Suite enables your businesses to uniformly govern access to applications and services across cloud and on-premise IT environments. By automating such IAM functions as user provisioning and entitlement certification, you can reduce security management costs and improve employee productivity.
The Identity Suite also includes an Identity Portal, providing an intuitive, business-oriented user experience designed to dramatically simplifies the process of managing user identities, access requests and approvals. In addition to the Identity Suite, CA offers Privileged Identity Management to enable you to manage shared accounts more securely, while providing fine-grained controls over the actions of privileged users.
Identity Administration
Identity Portal
Privileged Identity Management
Identity Governance