Businesses are becoming increasingly collaborative, and employee needs are evolving with remote work and BYOD (Bring Your Own Devices) becoming commonplace. What this means is that businesses are constantly challenged with managing identities (both user and device). Managing identities can be a complex task, as security policies are often inconsistent and it is easy for users to circumvent authentication and authorization policies.
Identity Management (IdM) addresses two mission-critical needs: ensuring appropriate access to resources across increasingly heterogeneous technology environments, and meeting increasingly rigorous compliance requirements. An IdM security practice is crucial for any enterprise. It is increasingly business-aligned, and it requires business skills, not just technical expertise.
Enterprises that develop mature IdM capabilities can reduce their Identity Management costs and, more importantly, support new business initiatives with greater agility.
Some of the common challenges in user life cycle management are:
➢ Hire-to-retire automated processes.
➢ Ensuring that users are provided access to all required assets from the moment they join the organization.
➢ Ensuring that users are disabled/de-provisioned as soon as their access to a particular resource has been terminated.
➢ Managing a central repository of User identities.
Leveraging popular Identity Management solutions, ZionTech Solutions Inc. helps organizations to define and manage their user life-cycle. For example, a user may need access to multiple applications, ranging from web applications to legacy client/server applications. Creating and managing the associated user accounts is often time-consuming and error prone. Users (and their supervisors) often experience delays in the set-up of system access that the user needs to be productive. Auditors complain that there is no way to easily ascertain which users have which access to which systems. There could be security breaches that result from users being left with system access they shouldn’t have when they move from one department to another or leave the organization.
An Identity Management (IdM) solution addresses these kinds of problems by managing user accounts across all of an enterprise’s different applications and platforms. It applies predefined rules to automatically create, modify, or disable user accounts, mailboxes, shared drive access, or other resources based on corresponding events occurring in the target system of record. It offers an interface and workflow tools that can also permit decentralized, user-driven requesting and granting of system access, along with a snapshot of a user’s system access across the organization.
ZionTech has been implementing Identity Management solutions for companies of all sizes, including global enterprises in a variety of industries .Our Identity Management practice offers a full range of services that include the following:
➢ Environment assessments, feasibility studies, and proof-of-concept (POC) demonstrations for scoping and planning around enterprise IdM initiatives.
➢ Design of logical and physical architecture for IdM infrastructure.
➢ Implementation and customization of standard packages for IdM.
➢ Business process analysis and engineering for enterprise IdM services.
➢ Outsourcing of maintenance and production support for IdM infrastructure.
➢ Project and Program Management for IdM implementations..
Organizations need an automated process to manage user access to systems within and across partner domains.
Some of the highlights of our services include:
➢ Requirements analysis for enterprise entitlements, including defining a roadmap for application integration.
➢ Architecture design for entitlement services.
➢ Entitlements technology implementation and customization.
➢ Policy development consulting, including definition of a user classification framework.
➢ Program management for developing, deploying, extending, and maintaining enterprise entitlement services.Designing and deploying user entitlements to control users’ access to enterprise applications and data can be complex and costly. The stakes for failing to manage access to information assets are raised by regulatory requirements and internal competition for company financial resources. Controlling user access to specific functions and information inside applications is usually enforced on an application-by-application basis. Every application has its own user classifications, its own access policy model, and its own implementation of algorithms for allowing or denying user access. Because a variety of such applications can proliferate in an organization, managing the access rights of individual users across multiple applications becomes complex, tedious, and prone to error. ZionTech has extensive experience in designing and deploying entitlement solutions that can be leveraged across multiple applications. We have helped several clients identify requirements, evaluate products and design, develop, and customize implementations. We have used the various products extensively, both in POC/live deployments for customers and in developing custom solutions.
Often there are many more roles defined for an application than there are users. This problem multiplies exponentially when you consider all the applications your organization supports. Typically, this happens when the organization does not have a centrally defined role governance policy: the roles are created only to provide access to users to different groups. Managing a complete and correct set of roles is the foundation for implementing role-based access control. Leveraging popular role-based access control solutions, ZionTech Solutions Inc. can help your organization identify the best approach for role management. We’ll work with you to define, create, and manage your enterprise roles and related user access.
Governance is critical to the success of an Identity Management (IdM) program. Effective IdM governance requires that responsibility for the IdM program oversight, direction, and accountability be well-defined and effective. ZionTech encourages our clients to establish a steering committee with a defined program charter, to ensure widespread visibility and understanding of IdM activities. Representation from key business units and legal, risk management, and compliance departments is recommended for a governance steering committee. It will be an authoritative voice for IdM-related policies, procedures, and acceptable standards; furthermore, inclusion of these stakeholders ensures that IdM service delivery components will be more effectively implemented within acceptable business operating boundaries.
Compliance architecture enables you to achieve regulatory and policy compliance in the most cost-effective way possible. Businesses must comply with an ever-increasing number of regulatory and legal requirements that affect all levels of the organization. Enterprises need to apply effective controls to comply with these requirements. Our compliance practice can help your enterprise roll out an Identity Management (IdM) solution designed to ensure that access to sensitive systems and data can be controlled and audited. Any given enterprise is typically subject to multiple sets of overlapping regulations that cumulatively build an overall set of compliance requirements. Each enterprise also has its own set of internal information security and audit policies that create additional requirements which need to be fulfilled.
Frequently these various requirements have been addressed incrementally over time in the enterprise’s IdM services, leading to an inefficient patchwork of compliance-related solutions and creating unnecessary operational and maintenance expense. A better approach is to develop an IdM compliance architecture that distills the regulations and directives into a concise and transparent “superset” of requirements. This can then be mapped to an IdM solution with the technology tools and business processes to fulfill all the compliance requirements.
A program to implement the necessary IdM solution set can then be formulated based on the compliance architecture. For example, an entirely new IdM solution set might be rolled out if there is none in place or if the existing solution is considered obsolete. Alternatively, if a satisfactory but only partial solution is already in place, the program would integrate additional solution components to enhance or complete the existing IdM solution set.
The ZionTech systems compliance practice can provide your enterprise with the consulting support you need to implement a robust compliance architecture, including:
➢ Analysis of compliance requirements affecting your company.
➢ Workshops with key enterprise stakeholders and subject matter experts to develop and communicate the compliance architecture.
➢ Design of technical IdM infrastructure that will underlie the compliance architecture.
➢ Business process analysis and (re-)design for IdM services.
➢ Roadmap planning and program management for rolling out new or enhanced IdM infrastructure and services.
