Identity Management Consulting
Identity management (IdM) is a set of processes, tools, and agreements among organizations and individuals. Identity management determines how the identities of IT resource users are created, maintained, utilized, and eventually retired.
Typical problems in organizations that lack a solid IdM framework
- Extranet services are expensive to manage and confusing to customer
- Old employees are still in systems
- Changes in access rights generate too many costs
- User lifecycle processes are slow (>5h) and inflexible
- Auditing one user's current access profile is in practice impossible
- Costs of auditing all users are very high
- M&A operations are slow and expensive
- New services need to "re-invent the wheel" again
- Major part (>30%) of help desk calls are for password resets
Nixu IdM framework
The IdM framework is a cycle of continuous improvement.
Discover and Envision
During the IdM definition phase we will dig answers to your questions ...
- Are we ready for an IdM project?
- How should I define the project scope?
- Should I split it into phases, and how?
- What technology angle should I choose?
- How should I show the business value of IdM?
IdM issues can be solved in many ways. You might have noticed that every vendor is pushing their solution and product. Although technology can provide substantial automation and enforcement of established procedure, a great deal of IdM activity is the documentation, assessment, and human processes within an organization. What we, and analysts have noticed, is that IdM product vendors sometimes focus too much on their project deliveries. We have helped governmental, telecommunications, manufacturing and financial organizations to develop IdM processes to fulfil their requirements. IdM requirements often include the following headlines:
- Business facilitation
- Cost containment
- Operation efficiency
- Risk management
- Regulatory compliance
If some of these requirements are driving your organization to develop your IdM ecosystem, take advantage of our pre-defined services like IdM readiness- and discovery workshops.
Define
Identity management is not about products, but should be considered as a service oriented framework that includes integration with business processes, roles and technologies. Our two senior IdM advisors can help your team to success by aligning a solid Identity Management roadmap, policy and architectural framework.
At this stage we also recommend that the project scope will be fixed and a requirements specification documented. This could be guided by one or many of the high level business drivers listed above.
Design and Plan a Successful Implementation
An analyst research showed that a major part if not all of failed IdM implementation projects had overlooked the importance of design and planing. It's important that stakeholders will get the right level of understanding of the possible choices. During the desing and planing phase we will help you to develop business processes (workflows), roles, a detaild architecture, an implementation plan and an attribute data map. At this stage it is natural to choose the required products to fulfill the customer needs. As we have seen many projects and seen the capabilities of almost all leading IdM products, we cannot recommend too strongly the use of senior expert help when evaluating IdM products.
IdM Solution Architects and Technical Project Managers
Many times organizations that start their IdM journey have difficulties to ensure that vendor-led IdM projects fully support their needs or even match the requirements. These are areas where we, as independent experts can take responsibility. Based on a well-formulated requirements specification it is easy to measure some project deliverables. Other success factors include general best practices for ITSM, Cobit, regulatory compliance, as well as factors more specific to identity management, such as effective use of roles.
IdM Compliance and Auditing
Our Security management auditing services cover IdM in the compliance and auditing scope.