Benefits and Tips for Creating an IAM Roadmap
BENEFITS
Identity and Access Management (IAM) projects bring a promise of tremendous business and security benefits. Some of the most obvious reasons to automate your IAM program include:
- Time Savings: Automation of user provisioning and governance, such as user access reviews, provide tremendous value and labor savings.
- The Right Access: Automation, especially provisioning by role-based access, leads to consistency of access. Users get the right level of access for their position.
- New Hire Day One Access: By using automated user provisioning, new hires can have their accounts created and access established before beginning, optimizing the on-boarding process.
- No User Left Behind: An IAM program will easily identity and help avoid orphaned user accounts, those left behind when workers leave the organization.
TIPS
Unfortunately, IAM projects are often plagued by high failure rates and run the risk of long delays. Failures and delays are typically due to a combination of project management and technology. You should develop your plan and IAM roadmap before beginning project implementation to ensure your solution meets your requirements. Some important tips include:
- Phased Approach: Before jumping to the end, the well-defined roadmap will ensure success or you will stop the project along the way rather than risk failure.
- Early Success: Each step should realize project success to enable support for the effort. For example, in Step 1 you will deliver automated user access reviews, realizing massive time and business benefits.
- Set Measurable Milestones: Your plan should include concrete deliverables such as automating entitlement reviews, automating user on-boarding, automated user termination, and more.
- Set Realistic Expectations: You will not enable full role-based provisioning in one week. Moreover, not every company or person will fit cleanly into a business role. Rather, we should set expectations and goals that move the program forward, providing value and benefits, rather than perfection.
IAM ROADMAP
A well-designed roadmap is essential for a successful Identity and Access Management program. Common pitfalls and project delays can be avoided by following a three-step process, gaining success at each phase of the project. At SCC, we advise our customers to focus on these 3 steps:
- Governance: Governance is the read-only side of the project. You will learn your systems and data, and gain quick value by automating user access reviews, off-boarding, and separation of duties.
- Role-Based Access Controls: In order to prepare for provisioning, you should consider if your organization can create business roles that define a standard profile for various types of jobs.
- Automated User and Access Management: The final step is enabling the automation of user access rights changes including on-boarding, off-boarding, and role changes.
This paper will review each of these steps in more detail, providing tips and guidance on how SCC’s Access Auditor suite will help you deliver success. We will also discuss when it’s appropriate to stop the process and simply implement automated governance. By following this roadmap, you will ensure that you implement the right level of IAM automation for your environment.