The benefits of technology are immense and this statement is not new to us. The scope of technological advancement leave us with a sense of awe and surprise – the process of inducting technology into a traditional system is not easy. It becomes even more complex when technological induction surpasses individual capacity and takes to a whole bunch of people, just as in case of Identity Management.
Here are the top challenges that companies face when it comes to making a decision:
- Finding validation of fancy claims. While the back-end dynamics are not to be understood by decision makers, management often question whether claims related to achieving efficiency, security, optimization and automation are valid? Picture this – an identity protected system brings considerable decrease in time required to retrieve forgotten password. Password recovery requests can eat many valuable hours of help desk and the employee who is trying to recover the password. They enable businesses to achieve one-click access to all personal & business resources required by an employee. Since an employee’s identity is the weakest link to break into an organization, IAM solution paves way to a reduction in cyber security risks through automation and self-service system administration. All this come with a governance compliance, easily auditable repository of data.
- Getting comfortable with complexity. Even when the management is satisfied with validation, the next layer in the decision making process is complexity. Given various permutation and combination of interaction amongst employees, applications and devices, it is complex to bring them under one umbrella. However once the architecture is sorted – it becomes really simple to manage an archaic dynamics of too many logins and multiple layer of security. You get a simple User Interface (UI) that does all the heavy lifting as it interacts with the backend. It defines access based on policies, streamlines identity verification and automates access all possible platforms – desktops, laptops, palmtops, application, social platforms…
- Understanding benefits in quantitative terms. While pay-per-use model – IDentity as a Service (IDaaS) is considered a value for money deal, organization with over 10,000 employee are encouraged to go for On-premise Identity Management. Whichever route one prefers to take, when it comes to listing all the ROI driven quantitative benefits the situation gets quite tricky. Technological benchmarks in Identity Management space are missing and the ones that are being set meet new milestone frequently. The limit of qualitative benefits is relative – for CEO it can only be achieving business efficient and competitive, while for a CFO instant results matter and a CTO will count security as the only deliverable and will not be comfortable with an on-cloud structure of Identity Management. Therefore it is important to view IdM protected system as a holistic organizational system.
