The Challenge: Off the Shelf or Fit For Your Purpose Identity and Access Management

Is an off-the-shelf solution really the remedy to modern IDAM/IAM needs?

A recurring theme for organisations in the market for Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions is to seek, ask for and buy an off-the-shelf product. Product implies: highly referenceable, mature cost (cheaper), mature exposure and minimal customisation, complexity.

Have these off-the-shelf products actually evolved?

There’s a list of realities though, counterbalancing what looks like old, tried and tested tech…I mean integration is de rigeur nowadays isn’t it and self-managed password and authentication of all factors has been around for as long as…PIN numbers? 

But…and there are buts…discounting any old school technology providers out there for a moment, the new IAM providers tend to be new, providing new SaaS solutions and bringing together existing but re-purposed, designed tech and functionality to provide enhanced services in the IAM space. 

A number, like ourselves, are in the DevOps development mode… (and we have 20 years’ experience too), enabling the fast test and development to production of micro services. Customisation then, in theory, should be faster and cheaper. Well it is.

IAM solutions HAVE to be adapted to be effective

However, the complexity of Identity Management and the new scale of integration has not gone away. Integration to a single system is manageable and for a standard app, rapidly achieved. For one non-standard app…well…one IAM vendor quotes 39 days of effort…maybe they have an IT services background/revenue drive? An organisation might have say, 200 apps spanning on-premises, hybrid and cloud. On average, around 10 of these are likely to be non-standard. Cloud and the cost benefits of driving apps and services to cloud then looks like it has some initial development pains and pounds.

Clearly one needs a plan and a solution that will mitigate against these pains with their potential, associated cost implications. There really is a substantial ROI in implementing IAM (See Gartner, Forrester et al) and none of it needs to be lost.

Baseline IAM similarities V unique organisational processes

Back to the complexity of IAM then. While there are commonalities of basic structure between organisations, the policies and practices required are different. The definitions of roles, groups and their attributes also are unique. You might want a B2C too. We want superb user-experience in the enterprise IAM as it impacts productivity and usability. So to avoid cost, time and complexity of hard coding and customisation, or having to re-visit the design when there is a process change, New Era’s Able+ incorporates a workflow drag and drop functionality. Able+ is managed by admin personnel, you don’t need your IT team on this, admin use this capability to change or adjust and map policy and process changes. It makes for timely, effective, efficient set-up by us and crucially, ease of use and low cost of ownership for our customer.

How Able+ Cloud satisfies exacting client requirements

Able+ therefore, fits the specific client requirements by fitting around the customer right down to the granular detail. And there’s an App management tool in there – also for admin to provision and de-provision.