For the second year in a row, WX+B Cyber attended Gartner’s Identity & Access Management Summit 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada. We spent three days learning about new IAM strategies, sharing insights and meeting with leaders in the IAM industry. Not surprisingly, many of the conversations were focused on the future of IAM. One of the biggest topics we noted was IAM and the cloud.

Cloud is becoming the expectation, not the exception.

Companies are moving more and more of their business to the cloud. This shift is creating an urgent demand for cloud-based IAM strategies. Gartner emphasized the importance of cloud services in IAM throughout the event. Many enterprise-level companies use cloud solutions for only a portion of their operations and continue to manage IAM with on-premise technology. However, mid-market companies are expressing more and more interest in the cloud; Gartner noted that over half of mid-market companies now ask about cloud IAM services.

Gartner noted that over half of mid-market companies now ask about cloud IAM services.

What does this mean for your business?

If you’re enterprise level, sticking with on-prem is still the norm, but even large enterprises can’t ignore the cloud. Their organizations will demand the agility that cloud based applications can offer. This means that their IAM program will need to address both on-prem and cloud-based applications.

If you’re small or medium-sized, you might consider looking into cloud-based IAM options as your primary solution to keep up with your competition.

Many companies approach IAM software implementation the same way they would for a pre-packaged application. This is a mistake.

We heard from several attendees that one of the biggest difficulties of getting up and running with IAM is that companies often try to implement it as they would pre-packaged software.

With pre-packaged software, you purchase it, configure it and begin using it. However, with identity management, you install it, configure it into your network and then begin integrating it with other applications. Often, those integrations aren’t out-of-the-box; they usually involve coding, which requires a development-style approach, unlike plug-and-play software applications.

This can cause IAM systems to take much longer to get off the ground. For companies that invested in IAM expecting quick results, the lack of a solid implementation methodology tends to slow the project’s progress, raises red flags to management and causes the solution to be difficult to support in production.

The biggest roadblock to successful IAM programs today is the lack of best practices during implementation.

Unfortunately, a poor implementation methodology can lead to a persistently cumbersome IAM system if not addressed. They usually stem from the lack of a thorough plan from the beginning; some companies implement IAM on their own, or through a provider that doesn’t set expectations and provide a clear roadmap for implementation and management.

Fixing your IAM system takes a lot less time than starting from scratch.

If you’re in the “in over our heads” boat (or the “ready to throw it out the window” boat), you can relax. Improper IAM setups are fixable. In fact, WX+B Cyber specializes in doing just that.

We’ve seen quite a few incomplete or faulty IAM systems due to improper deployment, and our engineers analyze these systems to develop a comprehensive plan for fixing them. We approach IAM like developers, not just implementers, and we recognize that most integrations need some customization. Our engineers understand your end goal and follow best practices so that the system functions seamlessly in production and is more easily upgraded as business requirements change or the software vendor enhances its product.

Better yet, fixing an existing IAM system takes much less time than starting from scratch. At WX+B Cyber, we can often re-engineer existing IAM systems in 30-60 days. To learn more about how we can fix existing IAM implementations, contact one of our representatives today.