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The Access Management Headache - IT teams across EMEA prescribed Unified Access Management to ease access pains
September 2018 by Dan Powers, Enterprise Regional Manager at OneLogin
Digital innovation is driving the necessary transformation for businesses to survive
in today’s challenging macro-economic and global business landscape. Digital
business transformation is critical to driving profitability, growth, customer
satisfaction and increased speed-to-market. As such, the adoption of digital
technologies is accelerating at an unprecedented rate and a huge proportion of this
is the investment in, and onboarding of, both SaaS-based and on-premise
applications. In fact, recent OneLogin research found that 92% of UK enterprises,
whose IT decision makers were surveyed, have a digital transformation strategy and
over two-thirds anticipating they will deploy up to 100 new commercial SaaS and
on-premise applications equally in the next 12 months.
But the success of transformation rests not only on technological innovation and the
positive disruption it can bring to each business - it can only bring value if the
technologies are adopted and integrated in a seamless way across the business. With
mission-critical business apps, secure and user-friendly access can be the key
factor in determining whether investment in a technology brings real value or
instead goes to waste.
The end of IAM as an era
Historically, Identity and Access Management (IAM) has played a key role in managing
the deluge of applications, while maintaining security to support business
transformation. In fact, 90% see IAM as an important, if not critical, part of their
digitalisation strategy. However, the functionality and capabilities of traditional
IAM solutions have been outpaced by the sheer scale and pace of innovation and the
urgent need to secure access to applications and resources in complex global hybrid
landscapes that transcend the traditional corporate network.
The reality is that IT teams are overwhelmed with onboarding high volumes of
applications and staff to facilitate digital transformation and business growth.
Many are struggling to steer their enterprise towards a more efficient and agile
digital future that is secure and compliant across fragmented networks, divided
between on-premise and the cloud.
The dawn of the new era - UAM
Never has it been more critical - or more complex - to securely manage access across
the explosion of distributed applications, data, and intelligence. Enterprises need
to tackle this issue head-on and unify the corporate network through one single IAM
solution. IT teams need the ability to manage access for traditional on-premise and
cloud applications simultaneously through a "single pane" management console,
purpose-built for hybrid customer environments. Historically, a customer’s only
option was building a cumbersome, multi-vendor, prohibitively expensive solution.
With the divide between on-premise and cloud networks becoming even more evident, IT
teams are struggling to maintain harmony on corporate networks and it is becoming
increasingly unmanageable by the day. To ease this IT headache, recent advancements
in the sector have seen the network finally unified - welcome Unified Access
Management (UAM).
UAM enables IT teams to modify access privileges across all applications in real
time as opposed to days or weeks, and slash access management costs by 50% or more -
that’s the power of UAM. In turn, this unifies access management not only for
applications on multi-platforms, but also networks and devices, using SaaS
infrastructure to synchronise all corporate users and user directories. By unifying
all corners of corporate networks through one platform, organisations of any size
can finally align their platforms with digital transformation strategies, providing
a major competitive advantage against competitors who are behind in their digital
transformation journey and scrambling to manage dispersed networks.
Historically, access for these respective environments has been managed separately
and often inefficiently with IAM solutions catering to either SaaS or on-premise
environments, but not both, leading to a fragmented approach that is plagued with
complexity, inefficiency, and high cost. Consequently, there is growing
dissatisfaction with the available offerings, particularly for large enterprise
organisations with complex application portfolios spanning hybrid environments.
To keep pace with digital transformation and the change it incurs, businesses must
adopt a hybrid approach, that manages both on-premise and cloud solutions under one
umbrella. Businesses cannot afford to treat the two networks in isolation, they must
be integrated as part of an overall digital transformation journey if they want to
remain competitive and secure. With the European General Data Protection Regulation
(GDPR) now in place, businesses cannot afford not to have full visibility of their
networks and the data they process. If networks are neglected and don’t comply,
they are susceptible to fines up to 4 percent
of a company’s global revenue or penalties up to 20 million euros - whichever is
greater and irreparable reputational damage.
