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.
The opinions expressed in this post belong to the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Information Security Buzz.