What is Identity and Access Management (IAM)?

Identity and Access Management, commonly referred to as IAM, is a modern identity security feature which ensures the right entities (people or things) are authenticated and authorised to gain access to the right resources (data and applications) from any device, when they need without interference.

When you think of Identity and Access Management (IAM) think:

• Verification
• Authentication
• Authorisation

Removing the requirement for different user credentials and passwords, an IAM solution assigns individual entities a single digital identity – acting as the central key to access all resources, connecting both on-premises and cloud applications. IAM also allows entities to be monitored and managed throughout their lifecycle by the organisation and IT administrators, permitting easy user-management, access monitoring, recertifications(?), least privilege and JML processes.

Due to technological advancements and digital transformation(s), IAM is no longer solely focused on employees, contractors, or business partners alike. Secure access and identities must now be assigned to AI technologies, APIs and IoT devices.

Why does your organisation need IAM?

With the acceleration of cloud adoption, remote working, tech evolution and the frequency of cyber security breaches, organisations are realising the value that an identity and access management solution can provide. In fact, modern IAM should be considered a critical component for organisational security.

But why? IAM is an ever-changing discipline and organisations need to stay up to date with protocols and practises, to ensure organisational security on all levels and from all angles.

Organisations must have firm control over employee access to mitigate any possible data breaches, leaks, or serious security incidents. Incorrect allocation of an identity to an application, obscure role definitions or inaccurate classifications can result in employees having to too much or too little access, causing disruption to users’ productivity and consequently halting business operations.

Ultimately, the implementation of an IAM solution contributes not only towards the organisation’s protection from compromised credentials but can also contribute towards improved business productivity, seamless functioning of digital systems, increased efficiency, lowered costs, and improved information governance.

Key features of IAM

• Management of users: create, modify, restrict, and delete
• SSO: improving productivity
• Authentication: enforcement of policies and improving security
• Provisions or users: define level access and revoke access automatically

Business needs for IAM

• Review of existing directory and remediation plan/roadmap
• Solve directory issues
• Adoption of cloud identity and access management
  • Not sure how to incorporate, avoiding complexity and duplication
• Seamless working across applications and/or with partners
• Want to use National Identity Providers (eID) for access to data and/or apps
• Need to integrate Identity Providers that is seamless for users
• Want consistent access management control across organisations and applications that is easy to manage
• Want visibility compliance with respect to access management and/or account management across apps and organisation
• Want seamless identity across cloud applications and/or cloud providers

Shaping Cloud provides bespoke IAM solutions, allowing your organisation to access applications, data, and other information seamlessly and securely on any device from any location. This further permits your organisation to remain both productive and on-trend with technological advancements – meeting both the businesses and all individuals involved, requirements and needs.

Working with you, we take the time to fully understand your systems, data and applications, current backup and retention policies, as well as your business needs, requirements and more. This ‘Discovery phase’ allows us to determine the design and configuration of your new IAM solution. Shaping Cloud will then work transparently with the organisation, as you begin to convert your current state to the new IAM solution. To ensure quality assurance, on-going support, assistance and advise is provided and testing is carried out to assure that all migrations are smooth-running with minimal disruption and impact.

Our integrated Identity and Access Management service provides expert consultancy, design, development, implementation, integration and managed support throughout.

So why are we different?

Designing, implementing, and changing Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions has always been an important part of our work – positioning us as a cornerstone for any whole organisation architecture. At Shaping Cloud, we continuously work to expand our knowledge and experience to better understand and develop solutions for cross organisational working.

Unlike other organisations, at Shaping Cloud we allow our clients to consume any Identity Provider (IdP) they wish, individuals can also use any identity tool of their choice and, most importantly, we encourage our clients to utilise single sign-on (SSO) which allows your team(s) to use just one set of login credentials, conveniently granting access to all apps.

So, whether your organisation requires a simple Azure Active Directory (AAD) implementation, the adoption of a 3^rd party Identity app, or a custom-dev IAM solution to manage complex inter-organisation identity and access management and compliance, Shaping Cloud can help and ensure a successful outcome.