Ease your pain with identity management as a service

Posted on July 13th, 2011 by Bethany McGrath | Tags: Service

As cloud computing moves from the fringes and into the mainstream, most organizations have become comfortable with the idea of software as a service. It makes so much sense to let someone else host and maintain an application instead of buying or building it for use in-house.

Many companies also are warming to the idea of other major IT components being delivered as a service. Management as a service. Mobility as a service. Even infrastructure as a service. The whole notion is to reduce cost and complexity by letting someone else invest in and be responsible for the hardware, software, operations and maintenance of common IT components.

EXPERT GUIDE: SaaS and IaaS

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As cloud computing moves from the fringes and into the mainstream, most organizations have become comfortable with the idea of software as a service. It makes so much sense to let someone else host and maintain an application instead of buying or building it for use in-house.

Many companies also are warming to the idea of other major IT components being delivered as a service. Management as a service. Mobility as a service. Even infrastructure as a service. The whole notion is to reduce cost and complexity by letting someone else invest in and be responsible for the hardware, software, operations and maintenance of common IT components.

EXPERT GUIDE: SaaS and IaaS

But have you considered the benefits of acquiring enterprise identity management as a service? Identity and application access management is now ripe for a cloud outsourcing model because of the cost, the complexity and the nature of specialization.

In many cases, an organization will do identity management the old-fashioned way — it will buy the software, implement it internally with a consultant, get trained on its use and then own it. The whole process easily can take more than a year to implement and cost the company millions of dollars. The bulk of the cost can be attributed to the implementation and training components, which can be three to five times the cost of the software and the ongoing ownership. When the consultants hand over the system and walk out the door, the internal operations team has to manage a complex system that is intimately tied to the organization’s business processes and applications.

This approach has several pain points. First, in today’s era of cloud computing, it’s taking way too long and costing way too much to implement the system. Next, once the consultants walk out the door, the operations team is put into reactive mode, not knowing what to do if something breaks, or spending too much time trying to resolve minor issues. And finally, an identity management system must keep up with the organization’s needs. What happens when new business processes or applications — especially those that are outside the enterprise firewall, such as SaaS applications — need to be added to the mix?

Not surprisingly, these are the same issues that gave rise to software as a service.

Identropy wants to take away the pain. Identropy’s solution is a cloud-based service where companies can deploy their identity and application management infrastructure. Within that private cloud, Identropy already has the IAM software installed, pre-architected and pre-configured based on the most common configurations and architectures that more than 80% of Identropy’s 120-plus customers already utilize. This takes away much of the time and cost of getting an identity management system up and running. Customers plug the Identropy solution into their back end systems and tweak the configuration to make sure it works effectively and provides the access governance capabilities they are seeking.

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