Are You Taking The Right IAM Approach?

Identity and access management (IAM) projects can be behemoths.  It’s not like you are simply installing an application that grants user rights.  IAM needs to be its own IT business program.  And you need to have the proper team to guide it to success.

Identity Access Management is one of the fastest growing business areas in the world.  According to a recent NBC article and market report by Grand View Research, Inc.; the Identity and Access Management (IAM) market is estimated to attain a valuation of around USD 24.55 billion by 2022.   According to Gartner, IAM addresses the mission-critical need to ensure appropriate access to resources across increasingly heterogeneous technology environments and to meet increasingly rigorous compliance requirements. This security practice is a crucial undertaking for any enterprise.

As an Identity Management (IDM) Consultant and implementation engineer, I live and breathe these projects, and I’m happy to report that the company I work for has an industry-leading success rate.

Elements To Building A Successful IAM Approach

One of the key reasons we succeed is simply our collective experience.  At every corner of an IAM project, there is something that will attempt to stall or disrupt the project.  It might be an application owner that isn’t responsive or the network team reissuing a certificate without warning, and until you’ve experienced one of these issues you won’t know how to effectively navigate.

Typically when I take on an IAM project (ex. connect IDM to SalesForce for automated provisioning) the technical aspects of developing the connector isn’t the part I’m concerned with.  Lock me up in a room, give me a computer, give me enough time (and coffee), and I can setup a connection to any application.  The part I’m concerned with, and the part I like to immediately start thinking about, are the obstacles that will slow the projects progress.  Do we have the proper data to correlate users? Do we have the right people engaged on the clients side?  What are the unique use cases with the project that we haven’t done before?​

I think the initial business side assumptions of an IAM project may be outdated, as I commonly get the impression with a budgeted IAM project, business assumes it will automatically be a success, which is not realistic.

But I find by quickly bringing the client-side implementation team up to speed on how we will make a project succeed and what the implementation realities are, IAM projects can quickly realize secure and tangible ROI that is far from being outdated.