IDA for Dummies – part II

  • Article

This is not my favorite header though…but I chose this for only reason that “XXXX for Dummies” was pretty successful series :)

 

What Does Identity Management Help in-

  • Set house in order: Frankly, I have been to one the very big financial organizations in India. And guess what?? They have loads of user accounts of the employees who no longer work for them. They have no information about which ids to keep and which to delete.

Identity Management is very useful in deleting the orphan or ghost accounts :)

  • Provision new users rapidly:
    • Imagine you joining an organization and your IDs are given to you by your manager on your first day along with password. What’s your impression…?? Who cares about employees impression…well firstly, employee gets on job day one….saves money for company…and don’t forget the “feel good factor” of employee about the organizations.
  • Management of users – Changes in roles, promotions, demotions, acquisitions, mergers / demergers etc are handled in automated manner. Again saves money for organizations…
  • User IDs are created based on the roles and hence no extra authorizations provided. Makes environment safe.
  • Faster time to rollout for new applications – When new applications are out, the organization can just integrate with the Identity Management framework and Identities are populated into new application. This decreases the time to market for organizations…giving them competitive edge.
  • If your organizations are subjected to Audits, this would definitely help you get compliance…
  • Users would reset their own password using self-service mechanism….again IT Teams involvement reduced..they can work on something more useful…saving money for organizations again.
  • Users can request for additional access/authorization which can be tracked based on audit  trails.
  • All approvals / rejections are tracked, creating sense of accountability in organization.

 

These are some of the benefits of Identity Management. There are more and they depend on organization to organization too.

Access Management is a step above Identity Management, which states that once you cleanse your user data i.e. how the policies should be enforced. I would talk more in this Access Management later.