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There’s nothing like a little login frustration to turn users against their IT gatekeepers, storming the help desk with their digital pitchforks and torches. People expect simplicity, ease-of-use and flexibility when accessing workplace resources. Whether they bring in their own devices, use personal apps for company work, or look for unfussy access to corporate resources while away from the office, users face what appear to them as draconian identity controls. But many are just stagnant authentication controls that don’t work very well any more. And given this scenario, users are opting to go around. A survey reported by InfoSecurity says that 46% of users in sales roles admitted to “bypassing security controls to access necessary sensitive information to get the job done.” All this adds up to depressed business agility and competitiveness. It’s not that IT isn’t trying to say “Yes” to the business. As companies sign up for cloud and mobile apps at an ambitious rate, IT has done its level best to respond, usually by standing up independent Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions. But since these IAM solutions are frequently deployed as silos, each with a separate sign-in interfaces, different rules and administrators, they incur the quiet wrath of users who already can’t remember all their passwords and “cheat” by using the same password repeatedly. Shadow IT is often the unfortunate step-child of poorly planned identity management. Some organizations are figuring it out. Helped along by standards being widely accepted (such as OpenID, WS-Fed and others) by application writers and cloud providers, these organizations are re-writing the rules on identity management. They are daring to connect all of their applications (cloud, mobile, on-premise, web) into their identity management systems. While there is no panacea and good identity management takes hard work, the early benefits of a Well, they can start by putting their pitchforks away and getting back to work. What does the next generation of identity look like? Basically, it is a single, all-in-one IAM system that allows you to extend your management of legacy and web on-premises apps to include SaaS and mobile offerings. It accommodates users working from any location – in the office, sitting at the local coffee beanery with triple-shot, two-percent latte in hand, on the road or at the dining room table and it simplifies sign-in without compromising security. This next-gen IAM replaces multiple identity and access management silos with a centralized solution that pays several benefits for IT and for your users. For the CIO or CISO, one-stop IAM technology delivers a consistent process and centralized policy for managing access across all your users and all the resources they need to reach. You’ll be able to put your organization in a continuous compliance mode that can be adapted quickly as your business changes and regulations evolve. But mostly, you will be getting IT out of their way of the users who drive your business. You’ll be able to give them all the new tools (not the pitchforks, however) they need, whether on-premises or in the cloud, and you’ll be saying “Yes” to the business. The post How to Tame the Digital Pitchfork Mob and Harmonize Your Identity Management appeared first on Speaking of Security - The RSA Blog and Podcast. |
