In our previous blog, we looked at the business drivers behind the growth of cloud-based Identity and Access Management (IAM). These drivers, combined with cultural and technology trends, have made cloud-based IAM more attractive – and, frankly, more necessary – than ever.
Now that business has evolved to offer more and more interconnected and interdependent services to a wider range of users, the old models we had relied on to manage identities no longer apply. Our old identity management and security models designed for internal users simply can’t keep up with the rapidly evolving landscape. The forces that are shaping this new reality are so powerful, their momentum so great, that they now dictate the terms of how identity must be managed within an organization. The balance of power has shifted away from the IT organization and into the hands of end-users. If you are to meet their expectations, if you hope to compete and remain relevant, you must make the transition from build-your-own IAM to out-of-the-box IAM, from customization to configuration.
While there may be a big stick pushing us to make this transition, the carrots are equally compelling: lower costs, faster time to market, enhanced security, greater flexibility and, perhaps most important, the freedom to focus on the value and quality of the services you provide instead of how they’re provided.
There may be no better example of this than bring-your-own-device (BYOD). For years, IT laid down the law to prevent it. Now, fueled by the consumerization of mobile devices and tablets, BYOD has become the rule rather than the exception. It was inevitable. BYOD not only reduces strain on the organization to purchase and support such devices, it also increases employee satisfaction and productivity.
But, of course, the concerns behind the original reticence to allow BYOD remain. In fact, those concerns are magnified now that we’ve moved from uniform desktops tethered to the office to diverse mobile devices that can literally be taken – and lost – anywhere in the world.
Here’s where out-of-the-box solutions such as Oracle Access Management Suite come to the rescue. They’re designed to enable centralized policy management for securing access to services via mobile applications, going beyond web single sign-on, authentication and authorization. Such solutions are designed from the ground up to handle the added complexity of password management and security in a mobile world, including strong authentication, real-time behavioral profiling, and device fingerprinting. Adaptive products such as those from Oracle provide a multi-faceted approach to mitigate breaches into mobile and Web Applications, all while tying into a closed loop audit process with powerful reporting and notification engines.
Another example is the growing need to manage external identities – those of partners or customers. It may be tempting to use existing capabilities designed for internal identities for this. After all, the same basic services are involved, including handling access requests, granting access, and password management. But the differences are simply too great. There are different business needs, different security concerns, different compliance requirements, even different licensing issues.
Here, too, the new cloud-based IAM models offer us a solution. Their multi-tenancy capabilities mean a single instance of software can serve multiple constituencies discretely by virtually partitioning the management of identities based on any criteria or business need.
As they say on those late night infomercials, that’s not all. The cloud model and its converging standards open the door to entirely new ways of dealing with external identities. For example, products such as Oracle Access Manager allow users to register for a site's services using their social login IDs as an authentication mechanism (using OAuth and OpenID standards). This gets the organization out of the business of managing these external identities altogether, delegating password management, user profile, account settings, etc. to a third party – Google or Facebook, for example.
If you’re not willing to delegate these tasks, you can still leverage external identities during registration by pulling the user’s basic identity information from a trusted third-party identity provider (IDP). This approach marries the old with the new, maintaining a security perimeter for user access by ensuring audit and closed-loop certification processes are still in place, while reducing the burden on the user who no longer has to provide basic information in order to register.
Delegation is a recurring theme in new IAM models. Cloud-based IAM, for example, makes it easy to push out user administration, certification and operational request management to individual lines of business. This in turn enables you to downsize centralized call support by using delegated authorities within those business units – managers who are closer (both conceptually and physically) to the users who require access. This is done via strong workflow management, which ties into a well-governed and managed role service as well as enterprise roles and processes for mover/joiner/leaver scenarios.
Case in point: the HR systems the US government uses to provision all roles (for resources and entitlements). Users request access directly from their managers. End-dates are used to enforce de-provisioning of all granted access, even during termination. The result is end-to-end lifecycle management with delegated administration, while ensuring compliance with a centralized audit process.
In our next post, we’ll explore what identity looks like in a secure, connected world and what that means for your business.