1 - Managing Digital Transformation Amid a Changing World and Workforce
2 - How Legacy IAM Holds You Back
3 - How Workforce Identity Transformation Propels You Forward
There was a time when tools like CA, IBM and Oracle were the de facto standards for access management, promising greater productivity and security. But just like the flip phone was once the pinnacle of mobile phone technology, those days are long gone. And even specialized in-house or custom-built IAM tools grow more obsolete by the day as new digital resources become more diverse and threat vectors expand.
These legacy systems are now a heavy and expensive burden on the IT teams that must continue to manage them. As they approach end-of-life, the original creators have slowed or stopped investment in these tools. Plagued by outages and other issues, they’ve become unreliable, requiring significant maintenance and dedicated, trained staffing resources just to keep them operational.
For many enterprises, disparate authentication silos—whether as a result of mergers and acquisitions or shadow IT—are also the norm. Legacy IAM tools offer no easy way to scale or consolidate, leaving overburdened IT teams with the unenviable task of maintaining overly rigid and complex infrastructures.
Proprietary and lacking open standards support, these tools aren’t able to support cloud, automation or DevOps initiatives. On the contrary, they’re slowing the onboarding of new applications and resources. In some cases, business application teams will also resort to deploying their own identity systems and continuing the cycle of shadow IT in the enterprise.
Discover 5 ways workforce transformation helps you boost agility.
Increasing workforce productivity is one of the top drivers of digital transformation. But a continued reliance on outdated systems makes productivity improvements challenging if not impossible.
An increasingly remote and mobile workforce means more employees needing access to corporate resources off of the network. At the same time, the workforce is no longer limited to employees. Contractors, partners and vendors are increasingly accessing your resources as well.
To realize the productivity gains your enterprise is seeking, you need to provide quick and convenient access to the apps these diverse users need. But if their access hinges on discrete logins for every resource, you’re at a distinct disadvantage. Employees waste nearly 11 hours per year entering and resetting passwords, and your helpdesk will be faced with managing the inevitable password reset requests that ensue. In the end, everyone’s productivity suffers.
Learn how workforce transformation supports increased productivity.
Giving an increasingly diverse and remote workforce access to corporate resources also presents security challenges. You need to make access consistent and convenient, but you can’t do so at the expense of security. Meanwhile, you’re also being asked to support access from multiple devices, including personal ones, which introduces new risks.
The traditional enterprise approach would enlist the use of a VPN for remote access. But in today’s threat landscape, the use of VPNs can cause more problems than they solve. Because they grant users access to large segments of the corporate network, VPNs can expose an employee to more resources than their role requires or warrants. This makes VPNs an attractive target for bad actors and increases the attack surface they can exploit.
The accelerated adoption of cloud technology is also forcing organizations to re-evaluate how they secure resources that reside on-premises and in the cloud. While legacy IAM solutions provide protection for on-prem resources, most struggle to extend beyond VPN or remote access, leaving them unable to support web and mobile apps, APIs, Linux or Unix servers, Windows login, offline multi-factor authentication (MFA) and other use cases.
Learn more about increasing security through workforce transformation.
Because they’re working against digital transformation—not to mention introducing unnecessary cost and risk—the once-great access management systems are not enough to meet your new business challenges. But you might not be ready to turn your back on these systems just yet. To move forward, you need to adopt a workforce transformation strategy that allows you to boost your capabilities now while gradually reducing your dependence on legacy systems.
You also need to have reliable and flexible tools that allow you to support your organization’s objectives and critical initiatives. While legacy solutions served their purpose at the time, the demands and requirements of today and tomorrow require the flexibility and customization found only in modern solutions.