With healthcare providers contending against growing information security risks and the rigors of regulatory compliance, identity administration solutions are emerging to bring sanity to chaos. In the wake of the pandemic, users ranging from caregivers to patients have started demanding better online experiences. These experiences must be backed up with assurances of their sensitive data being protected.
Accountable care organizations proliferate to create a sustainable network for patients in need, widening mutual vulnerabilities. Day-to-day hospital operations grow more complex due to the integration of multiple IT and identity vendors, hampering efficiency and creating friction. More and more patients access their sensitive records electronically, creating new touchpoints for potential cyber incidents. All these factors must be addressed if a healthcare-oriented organization is going to be secure, compliant, and successful.
Only by intelligently implementing identity administration can healthcare providers ensure timely and proper access to applications, files, and data. Consider these five identity challenges faced by healthcare providers and practitioners. Identity governance and administration (IGA) is a lifeline for securing employees, patients, data, records, and apps.
Managing Multiple Authoritative Sources
Many caregiving organizations have multiple authoritative sources for data. These include human resource applications, electronic health record systems (EHRS), learning management systems (LMS) and physician credentialing applications. The provider organization designates these and other applications as the true source for defining user identity and access rights. However, managing multiple identity sources and their access rights creates difficulty in ensuring consistent execution of policies and resource optimization.
Identity administration remediates this issue by consolidating these siloed systems into a single unified source of truth. Under this monolithic solution, a single definitive database collects all authority sources. This provides transparency, accessibility, and consistency across all activities. This, in turn, reduces the likelihood of a costly data breach by shrinking the attack surface. Additionally, the administration solution expedites account onboarding without compromising security, enabling quicker turnaround on new patients and employees. Unlike basic IAM solutions, IGA provides definitive and decisive controls over permissions, policies, and their enforcement.
Identity Administration for a Diverse User Population
The typical healthcare-provider setting hosts a diverse and transient population requiring access to health information as part of their regular workflow. This may include doctors, nurses, contracted physicians, students, volunteers, vendors, and many others. Ensuring the right people have the right access at the right time is a daunting task. However, the consequences for not doing so can create security gaps with serious financial and operational repercussions.
Automation in an identity governance solution is the core of efficiency, and the most effective means of tackling the diversity of users. Identity administration enables providers to gain visibility and control of their entire spectrum of diverse data users, creating a simplified and consistent approach. Rather than manually doling out access, an automated provisioning solution checks against a user’s profile and grants access as needed. Systems like adaptive MFA and SSO can further augment this function. Furthermore, the automation can be set up to include curation, automatically scanning accounts for inappropriate access or inactivity. Thus, the danger posed by orphaned accounts can be eliminated wholesale.
Multiple Roles/Personas in an Identity Administration Framework
Personas – individual roles or bundles of entitlements – help to build an identity by defining the different ways in which an individual engages a provider organization. In some cases, an identity may have multiple personas. For instance, consider the healthcare provider ecosystem. Physicians, nurses, professors, researchers, contractors, volunteers, and students are just a handful of job functions that may be present in one hospital. Yet many individuals can perform more than one function during any given day. To illustrate, a unit clerk in the emergency department may also be a nursing student who is doing a clinical rotation in the ICU. A physician may have an outpatient clinic in the morning and perform research work in the afternoon. Also, nurses may float between departments. To complicate matters, many of these functions can be transient.
By implementing a centralized identity governance platform which includes a PAM solution, healthcare enterprises provide adequate coverage for privileged access needs. Through close adherence to the principles of RBAC, users can be provisioned quickly and easily according to their status. Additionally, this avoids possible critical security gaps such as segregation of duty violations. This is particularly important for the provisioning and deprovisioning process. These features greatly reduce the potential vectors for cyber incidents via inappropriate permissions without creating friction or incurring additional costs.
Consolidating Disparate Processes
A single department or team does not always manage user access. At the same time, it is often managed through functionality native to the specific application. This creates disparity in processes that leads to security gaps and unnecessary burden on IT administrators and application owners. For instance, a contracted physician may be given access to the EHRS. However, due to accidental oversight, the physician is locked out of enterprise content management system. This prevents them from accessing scanned clinical media and photos. As a result, the physician’s efforts to fully understand a patient’s condition and provide timely care may be delayed.
Identity administration removes the barriers between applications and users by intrinsically connecting them via the central identity platform. When a single authoritative source (such as Simeio’s Identity Orchestrator) manages all identity functions, the issue evaporates. When siloed resources are the main source of friction, removing those silos becomes paramount to the pursuit of user satisfaction without compromising data integrity. This is doubly important for the consistent execution of security access protocols.
Leveraging Identity Administration Effectively
Identity administration is the key to enabling a healthcare organization’s operations. By implementing a single centralized view of the entire identity fabric, managing users and their associated privileges turns from a patchwork stopgap into a sleek and efficient process. Between streamlining provisioning processes and definitively determining who should have access to what and when, a strong identity administration solution provides quick and recognizable value.
Through identity administration, providers can better cope with the complexities associated with the current healthcare IT ecosystem and successfully scale to future requirements.
To get more details about identity administration for the healthcare environment, contact a Simeio identity advisor and learn how to start on your own digital transformation.
Too often, corporate decision-makers see the subject of IAM as too impenetrable. They believe it is too technical to invest in. The ever-looming threats of cybercrime and the potential ROIs from optimizing identity management hang like a dagger and a garland over their heads. Yet executives lack the insight necessary to make an informed call. Digital identity orchestration platforms seek to remedy this disconnect.
By packaging and commoditizing identity management within an easily digestible user interface, IO. Whether a business needs to control their customer accounts, partner profiles, or employee data, an orchestration platform enables them all.
Identity Orchestration is nothing less than the unification of an enterprise’s identities into a single platform. This enables greater accessibility for users and promotes user trust in your digital identities. Without orchestration, separate applications manage domains such as CIAM, IGA, and PAM. By restructuring these applications under a single viewport, enterprises no longer need to worry about juggling between apps. This makes identity management more cost-effective and efficient.
The Right Digital Identity Orchestration Tools
Implementing an Orchestration platform within your enterprise starts with a full assessment of your existing identity tools. During this assessment, your IAM service provider selects the appropriate IAM tools and technologies that align with your organization’s requirements and budget. This most likely means cutting out extraneous or under-utilized applications and substituting in better performing and cost-effective options.
However, simply curating applications is not transformative. Orchestration takes those siloed systems and integrates them with each other. In doing so, the applications enhance each other’s functions rather than interfere with them. Onboarding and offboarding users, integrating new applications, and enforcing security policies are unified into a single efficient platform. Instead of juggling multiple conflicting tools, users can operate across their entire identity fabric from a single point of contact.
Governance Structure in Identity Orchestration
Identity orchestration establishes a governance structure for how identities are used. These include roles, responsibilities, and processes. Many embarrassing data breaches result from a lack of proper perimeters around sensitive identities. Human error, specifically regarding compromised credentials, accounts for 44% of all data breaches according to a 2023 Verizon report. However, combating this vulnerability through onerous authentication protocols makes your interface cumbersome and difficult to use.
Orchestration avoids the problem through automatic security policy enforcement, with the system checking if the person requesting access has the appropriate permissions to do so. This system strictly outlines the proper use cases for company resources, allowing users to freely access appropriate data and applications with minimized the risk of abuse. Any deviations from those policies are flagged, reported, and even halted by the system, stopping potential breaches before they happen. When paired with zero-trust-based systems like adaptive multi-factor authentication and single-sign on, your business fortifies a perimeter around each individual identity, greatly reducing the chance of a breach.
Performance and Usage Monitoring
Another layer of ongoing security and ease of use supports the enforcement of entitlements around privileged identities: monitoring. Yet, while a live customer support service from your orchestration provider is certainly helpful, the thrust of IO monitoring comes from the platform itself. Active and automatic monitoring of your identity orchestration fulfills two crucial functions.
First, orchestration keeps a close eye on everything that happens within your systems. Thus, you always know who is accessing what. This is vital for isolating breaches before they become disastrous. Additionally, orchestration curates orphaned accounts (identities which are unused but retain abuseable access). The automatic governance systems discussed above provide a good deal of protection. However, the ability to remediate breach events is equally critical. Many companies don’t consider cybersecurity until after a breach has occurred. Fewer still think about recovery strategies. Yet, without an action plan before a breach, enterprises are hard-pressed to take effective steps towards remediation. Consequently, they suffer the worst of what a breach can inflict.
Secondly, the metrics gathered by an orchestrator greatly aid your needs for evaluation and compliance. With the proper monitoring capabilities in place, your enterprise can chart precise numbers on how well your platform is performing, giving you data-driven information on your ROIs. Additionally, because the system precisely records every action taken within, you are always paying forward your next audit. By collecting and recording usage data on all your identities, you can easily satisfy the needs of otherwise onerous regulations and compliance.
Digital Identity Orchestration is the Way Forward
Customer acquisition and retention becomes more challenging while cyber risks continue to grow. As such, enterprises must quickly adopt solutions appropriate for their identity and access needs. Identity orchestration has emerged as the only solution on the market which delivers on both fronts. Better user experience through optimized applications. Stronger security via automatic policy enforcement. One unified solution to handle both.
Like the road signs that inform you of upcoming intersections, patches of ice, and penguin crossings, IAM analytics guide you on your journey to identity maturity. An enterprise constantly collecting crucial data is no better off than an ignorant one unless they make gainful use of that information. The importance of IAM analytics to your maturity is two-fold: the very act of maintaining a strong analytics solution boosts maturity and maintains your systems’ performance.
Do you understand what goes into a robust IAM analytics solution and how it weaves into your identity fabric? If you prioritize the improvement of your IAM maturity (as you should) then IAM analytics are the capstone to your efforts. With a strong IAM analysis service backing up your IAM solutions, you’ll be ready to face your challenges no matter how many penguins cross your path.
Understanding IAM Analytics
Analytics as a unified practice is nothing less than the gainful use of metrics to inform your strategy. Analytics cannot use raw and unprocessed data directly. The data must be parsed and organized into an appropriate structure before it can be used in analytics. Expert identity review interprets this information and thus converts it into actionable insights.
When properly instituted, IAM analytics positively impact all areas of an identity fabric. Benefits include mitigating risks & frauds, timely termination of fraudulent accounts, preventing identity sprawl, and keeping compliant to industry standard goals. Analytics bring valuable insights to customers and help them in taking more data driven decisions, thus creating an impact.
Traditionally manual feeds from many distributed systems collect the IAM data. Manual data feed and distributed process with no data authenticity, and the correlation process was time and effort intensive. Additionally, the analysis can be slow or at least not in real-time. By loading the burden of analysis onto an automated analytics platform, those resources can instead be invested into acting upon the analysis recommendations.
Boosting Maturity with IAM Analytics
You must first understand what a suboptimal analysis solution looks like. Divya Turaga, Principal Consultant, Simeio, reports that many companies make the same mistakes regarding analytics. “They show a lack of data cleaning and outliers filtering process,” she says. “Their lack of a data authenticity verification processes and slow manual processes with SQL operations impact performance.” When companies lack expert knowledge of what goes into optimized IAM analytics, they set themselves up for failure. Their choice of analytics tools, tendency to confuse metrics with KPIs, deviated analytics mis-representing the company’s goals, incorrect conclusions drawn from the data – all these stem from inexpert handling.
For IAM analytics to aid maturity instead of bringing it down, users must get away from overloaded dashboards and be able to identify the right metrics to be tracked. Companies must consider various factors before opting for an IAM analytics tool. It must meet the enterprise’s security & compliance goals, provide a 360-degree view of the identity information, and enable real time analysis of critical metrics. Additionally, it must have remediation features within analytics for quick data-driven decision making and user and event-agnostic timeline information. It must possess advanced pattern recognition to predict future trends, events, or any outcomes. All of this must be scalable and flexible for customizations with easy visualization and control.
An IAM analysis tool with these capabilities improves your overall IAM controls posture. While you immediately improve your risk analysis and monitoring, the 7 other domains of IAM maturity also benefit. Access management, identity administration, and identity services all become more easily viewed thanks to the real time monitoring. Access governance, privileged identity management, IAM governance, and entitlement services all become more powerful thanks to being informed by analytics.
Implementing with Identity Orchestration
Identity orchestration helps achieve effective IAM and can provide the analytics capability your enterprise needs. Orchestration is an abstract layer on top of multiple identity systems. Thus it serves as the ideal launching point for your analysis engine. Additionally, because it is plugged in to your complete IAM fabric, it digs out the information most crucial to bolstering your maturity.
Just as identity orchestration helps achieve effective IAM, it also forms the basis of robust IAM analytics. Identity orchestration provides the data source modelling needed to connect to multiple IAM system and pull pertinent data. The platform then coverts the unstructured data using an integrated data processing engine to refine the data in real time. An orchestrator can provide functionality across crucial areas due to its vendor-agnostic nature. These include data injection, Hadoop data storage, and processing.
However, before activating an IAM analytics tool, all aspects of an enterprise must integrate it. You need an automated, scalable, and secure analytics tool. The individual metrics collected must be well defined and relevant to the areas they are examining. Because the tool is collating data and providing an interpretation of hard numbers, a degree of subjectivity comes into play. Therefore, it is crucial that the insights of industry experts model the interpretations the tool.
Ultimately, analytics and identity maturity optimize best through identity orchestration services which are specifically and expertly built up for the unique needs of your enterprise. By moving through a managed identity service with experience enabling analytics via orchestration, your analytics become meaningful and actionable. Furthermore, achieving optimization means pairing that analysis with the best tools for acting upon them to strengthen your IAM posture.
Your identity analytics serve as one of the primary guideposts on your road to achieving greater IAM maturity. When you’re stuck in the metaphorical blizzard of junk data collected during daily operation, you must know the shortest routes to where you need to be before you freeze. When navigating the treacherous landscape between AM, CIAM, IGA, and PAM, clearly defined and meaningful analysis is your best bet for moving forward, and not off a cliff.
Perhaps you understand the broad strokes of how identity analytics boost your maturity. Yet you remain unsure how a strong analysis service will specifically impact your IAM apparatus. Here you can explore the fine details of identity analytics for all four domains. Thus you’ll come to understand why an optimal metric and analysis platform is so important for achieving optimal IAM maturity.
Identity Analytics for Access Management
An AM identity analytics solution primarily concerns the evaluation and enforcement of access request policies. Systems metrics include login performance, accuracy, abnormalities, response times, and self-service performance. Business-oriented metrics include application SSO, federation performance and portfolio, and frequency of AM service utilization. An information collection tool extracts these data sets from the system’s raw event information. Then the analytics platform interprets them into service KPIs and live insights.
Measurement of these metrics occurs through a number of benchmarks. These include pre-defined parameters of applicable use cases, historical patterns, and the watermarks provided by the other technology partners/vendors. This information draws from several sources. These include target applications, application integration, the profile details of the requester, the source of the access, and user authentication methods. Additionally, it can also provide visibility of various access patterns, peak-load, and top-accessed applications. To make the analytics dashboards and metrics accessible, data from organization’s CMDB can be fed into the analytics service. This provides the user with real-time analytics of security events and threats.
These analytics guide stakeholders in their understanding of the state of their AM maturity. In turn, this enables efficient decision-making, helps plan for risk mitigation, and also bridges knowledge gaps. Informed by these results, optimal implementation strategies enable organizations to improve their security posture and identity maturity through live insights. When paired with an identity orchestration service, that implementation invites exceptional ROIs.
IAM Maturity for Customer Identity and Access Management
A CIAM identity analytics solution is essentially an extended version of AM which includes all AM metrics with the addition of customer identity-related information. In addition to AM metrics, CIAM dashboards presents data for several focused areas. User onboarding (registration, verification, proofing), self-service (profile/MFA management and password resets/recovery), and access sources (device printing and profiling). The analytics service collects this data from internal AM systems, custom applications, 3rd-party providers, and mobile services.
Some of these metrics analyze against pre-defined quantifiers. However, many of the metrics compare best against historical patterns unique to the enterprise. After all, while CIAM directly benefits your customers, their individual experiences will be subjective and harder to fit into an orderly format. This makes involvement by experienced experts all the more important in achieving an accurate analysis solution for CIAM. This analysis provides you with crucial information about your CIAM maturity.
Most CIAM solutions in the industry place particular importance on adhering to customer identity protection regulations. Therefore, it is critical for businesses to identify any breach or violation in the quickest way possible. The real-time dashboards for CIAM analytics enable businesses to have live visibility on their platforms for any identity-related mishap. This not only helps achieve compliance on paper but also improves overall customer experience as well as your enterprise’s detection and remediation capabilities. As well as, of course, your CIAM maturity.
Identity Governance and Administration and IAM Maturity
An IGA identity analytics solution considers user identities, accounts, roles, and entitlements that users have access to. IGA metrics can be broadly classified based on the processes as well as the services that they administer. This includes user groups, auditing access request logs, events related to user life-cycle management, certifications, monitoring of scheduled jobs, and automated processes for failures. Additional measurements include the total number of active users, orphan accounts, average onboarding time, and termination success/failure rate.
Given the extremely complicated minutiae of IGA analysis, implementing an effective identity solution can be overwhelming. Fortunately, due to the automated nature of many IGA aspects such as auto provisioning/deprovisioning, meaningful analysis is at least partially expedited. However, the effectiveness of this automation must start with an effective IGA solution. If the core IGA platform is flawed, then the metrics collected will be as well and two aspects of your maturity will suffer. This indicates a fundamental fact about analytics: they must be linked to effective IAM.
IGA analytics must also consider high-level controls. These include JML (Java Modeling Language) control, access re-certification controls, and SoD (segregation of duties). For example, Simeio IO analytics collects the data around these identity controls from one or more systems. Then the Simeio IO analytics correlation engine converts the unstructured data into a structured model. Thus, with your overall identity intelligence enhanced, you can effectively utilize your controls to achieve greater efficiency and security. When all these analysis systems are properly implemented, your IGA maturity skyrockets.
Privileged Access Management and Identity Analytics
PAM analytics are broken down into a few sub-categories. These are Privileged Account & Session Management (PASM), Privilege Elevation & Delegation Management (PEDM), Secrets Management, and Cloud Infrastructure & Entitlements Management (CIEM). Though often managed by a central service, each is implemented as separate solutions. Hence multiple sources provide the analytics information, each with unique use cases to execute. Among the key information gathered for analytics. The key metrics are system uptime, capacity utilization, licenses consumption, onboarding trends, and compliance.
PAM metrics analysis compares a pre-determined quantifier with a system’s measured performance. The predetermined parameters could be anything including a service-level agreement, an industry benchmark, or a compliance standard. Examples include as system availability, password compliance percentage trends, or revocation/inactivation of privilege access.
The results of the identity analytics help you answer several important questions about your PAM maturity specifically and your identity fabric in general. Are adequate process and controls in place for compliance? What are your key security/IAM gaps and how serious are they? Where they are in comparison to their peers? These questions help prioritize key security initiatives, achieve near-term and strategic objectives, and achieve effective PAM implementation.
Analysis Maintains IAM Maturity
Your analytics form a vital aspect of your overall identity maturity, but they serve an even more important role for your enterprise. By establishing a strong analytics apparatus within your organization, your hard-won improvements to maturity become much easier, and indeed possible, to maintain. Therefore, without a clear view on developing issues and emerging improvements, even the most cutting-edge identity platforms will become outdated, outpaced by new threats and better systems.
With a strong end-to-end maturity service predicated on implementing analytics from the start, your identity maturity investments deliver exceptional returns. But in the long run they will only deliver a maximal ROI if that service includes an enduring maturity strategy. Therefore you must select a service that puts identity maturity at the forefront of their offerings. If they don’t mention maturity or lack a standardized maturity measurement system, look elsewhere. You cannot neglect a single facet of your identity fabric, either as a pain point for users or a weak point in your attack surface.
This is why identity analytics form the core of analyzing your identity maturity. Because each domain supports the performance of the others, understanding the complex interplay between them comes down to expertise. Executing upon that understanding to provide real-time and actionable analytics requires further expertise. All this must employ extensive automation that is easy to use, accurate, and secure. Ultimately, only identity orchestration from a maturity-minded service provider can deliver the full-scale analytical needs of a major enterprise.
Are you a professional juggler? No? Then why are you trying to keep so many siloed systems up in the air? It’s only a matter of time before they all come falling, leaving you with nothing but a failed birthday party performance and a disappointed you! Identity orchestration may be your best defense against such disappointment.
Many companies deploy numerous IAM platform tools, with some utilizing more than 25 separate tools, to manage access rights. Additionally, the high percentage of organizations (96%) using multiple identity management tools showcases the complexity involved in this domain. The challenge lies in managing these diverse tools and optimizing investments in them.
Identity orchestration enables managing and coordinating an organization’s various identity-related processes and systems. It involves integrating different identity management technologies, such as user directories, authentication mechanisms, authorization systems, and identity verification services, to ensure a consistent and secure user experience across multiple applications and platforms. The benefits of identity orchestration are many, but here are five reasons why it plays a crucial role in an organization:
Centralized Identity Management
Identity orchestration enables organizations to consolidate and streamline identity management processes. This includes user provisioning, authentication, and authorization across diverse systems and applications. Centralizing these operations simplifies the task of managing user identities. This reduces the complexity and administrative burden associated with maintaining multiple identity repositories. Secondly, it promotes efficiency by eliminating redundant identity management tasks across various systems, reducing administrative overhead, and improving productivity. Lastly, identity orchestration ensures the enforcement of consistent security policies and access controls throughout the organization. This mitigates the risk of unauthorized access and enhances overall data protection.
Enhanced User Experience
For digital experience function leaders, identity orchestration is the answer, where balancing security and user experience is a priority. Organizations can provide a seamless and convenient user experience by orchestrating identity management processes. Too often, enterprises need to consider the experiences of customers, leaving partners and employees to languish. But with a single federated platform, all users enjoy the same high-quality interface. Users can have a single set of credentials to access multiple systems and applications, eliminating the need for multiple usernames and passwords. This improves user productivity and reduces the friction of managing multiple identities.
Improved Security
Unfederated identity systems have been repeatedly shown to be vulnerable to data breaches. Identity orchestration enables organizations to enforce consistent security policies and access controls across different systems, whether those systems are on-site, cloud, or hybrid. It ensures that users have appropriate access privileges based on their roles and responsibilities and ensures that orphaned accounts are swiftly scrubbed. Centralized identity management also facilitates the implementation of multi-factor authentication and remediation, enhancing overall system security.
Compliance and Governance
Many industries have specific regulatory requirements related to identity management and data privacy. These include compliance standards such as SOX, GBLA, HIPAA, PCI, and GDPR. Identity orchestration helps organizations comply with these regulations by providing mechanisms to manage user consent, control data access, and track user activities across systems. Ensuring that your enterprise meets (or exceeds) these standardizations is a vital step on your identity journey. Additionally, acing your compliance makes your enterprise more attractive to cyber-insurance providers and can lower your premiums.
Scalability and Integration
As organizations grow and adopt new systems and applications, managing user identities becomes more complex. Identity orchestration provides a scalable solution by integrating with existing systems and allowing seamless onboarding of new applications. There is a world of difference between letting your identities sprawl into chaos and enabling effective large-scale IAM ready for further growth. It enables organizations to quickly adapt to changing business needs without compromising security or user experience. By using identity orchestration as your foundation, everything your build on top of it has a much better chance of standing strong.
If you wish to start reaping the benefits of optimized orchestration, a managed identity service is the best place to start. Bringing together siloed tools, systems, and databases is a hefty undertaking. Only a dedicated team of identity experts can assess, implement, and maintain your scramble of patchwork solutions with minimal friction and maximal results.
Remember that if your internal identity staff is having difficulty now, orchestrating all your identity tools to work seamlessly with each other will only exacerbate their woes and create a sink for time and money. A managed identity service provider can support you in driving your transformation; get a fixed-cost, timeline-bound, and sleek orchestration platform from proven experts.
Identity orchestration is crucial in streamlining identity management processes, ensuring security, and providing a seamless user experience in today’s complex and interconnected digital environments. An ideal identity orchestration tool will bring all your IAM tools together, integrate them so they work effortlessly with each other, and optimize the investments you make. As an IAM program owner, you are putting a lot at stake when your identity platforms are siloed.
To put it simply an identity orchestration tool provides an easy interface for IAM program leaders and owners to manage all their identity tools and technology. You get all of your most important data and identity platforms in one place, visible and accessible from a single pane. Identity platforms have become a fundamental component of enterprise operations. The need has arisen with the increasing number of identity tools for each IAM domain and their ability to integrate with applications, and being able to monitor all of it through one source.
Identity orchestration tools are an essential component of modern identity and access management (IAM) solutions. They enable organizations to manage their users’ identities, access rights, and authentication in a more streamlined and efficient way. Identity orchestration tools provide a single platform for managing identity events, which makes it easier for organizations to enforce security policies, comply with regulations, and reduce the risk of data breaches.
The Visibility and Convenience of Identity Orchestration Tools
Identity orchestration is the overarching apparatus of identity platforms between multiple subordinate identity sources. Identity orchestration tools hover over your solutions for AM, CIAM, IGA, and PAM, abstracting out their functions into a more easily digestible and controlled format. The only inbuilt system in an identity orchestration tool is the interface. All other functions run off developer-made plug-ins. These link all the different programs together and make them work as a cohesive unit. The resulting tool streamlines and optimizes all of an enterprise’s identity platforms for greater efficiency, user-experience, and security.
The convenience of orchestrating tools into the ideal IAM program stems from this linking of system within a single pane. An ideal identity orchestration tool should be vendor agnostic, thus can efficiently work with multiple applications. For example, Simeio leverages its relationships with our myriad identity technology partners to create interoperational controls between programs. This means that the user can not only access all their identity functions from a single application, but also scale as needed.
With a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, the customer must do little or no upkeep of the identity orchestration tools on their end. The identity orchestration tool provider handles any new additions or emergent challenges on behalf of the user. This provides exceptional scalability for features as well as data volume. The value of this service swells exponentially if the same team that implements the identity orchestration solution oversees its ongoing operations. Their familiarity with the nuances of your systems makes them the best possible caretakers of your identity orchestration solution.
The Security of Identity Orchestration Tools
Identity orchestration tools can provide an exceptional advantage for threat detection and remediation. Beyond merely enabling better user experience and efficiency, the top-down view of intelligently implemented identity orchestration tool grants unprecedented optics across your attack surface. By integrating automatic threat detection and expedited avenues of remediation, identity orchestration tools can offer clear-cut, instant answers to the 6 identity and access security questions.
Automated policy-driven safeguards benefit substantially from the plug-and-play philosophy of identity orchestration tool. Programs implementing passwordless, SSO, and adaptive MFA can be applied across all sectors of the orchestration solution, providing scalable security for internal and external users. What’s more, security policies are uniformly enforced across your entire identity fabric by rolling them out through an identity orchestration tool. You can even implement your security policy within the identity orchestration tool itself.
Then comes the issue of active threat remediation. During an active breach, minutes make the difference between clamping down on an intruder and finding yourself locked out of your own system. Your Identity orchestration tools give you the ability to not only home in on the compromised system but instantly cut off access regardless of its place within your database. No time is wasted opening one window for IGA and another for AM. Everything is running off a single tool right at your fingertips.
Shopping for a Solution
Finding the best identity orchestration tool for your enterprise requires a few fundamental criteria. You want an offering with the proper suite of identity support at a price point reflecting the services you receive. Checking case studies, testimonials, and peer reviews of your prospective solution provider should all figure into your assessment strategy.
As previously discussed, vendor-agnostic scalability serves as the hallmark of a valid identity orchestration solution. Simeio Vice President of Engineering, Hamdan Nathersa, states that orchestration can do more than just abstract the technical details of the underlying technology stack. “The orchestrator should give additional value with the ability to correlate data elements from different tools,” he says, “and give meaningful insights.” Therefore, your identity orchestration solution should automatically pool together the disparate data points. Doing so gives you a comprehensive view of your entire identity fabric.
When considering the cost of an identity orchestration solution, you should try to secure a service that will provide you with full end-to-end coverage befitting the span of your orchestrator. The Simeio Identity Orchestrator is offered as part of our MSP. This provides clients with ongoing identity service in addition to initial setup and rollout. Due to the evolving nature of identity challenges, having a team of identity experts in your back pocket is less of a welcome bonus and more of a necessary part of modern intelligent identity strategy.
