Today, every organization’s main priority is digital transformation. It may be simple to create forward-looking, bold plans on paper, but in reality, implementing digitalization can be difficult and time-consuming.
Many businesses have relied on legacy infrastructure that has become the base of their operations for years. A tonne of moving parts is involved in unpacking all these operations to shift them entirely to the cloud or build a hybrid solution. One of the most crucial aspects of this process is digital identity, yet this area is often disregarded as businesses focus on specific software and hardware problems. Identity data is often dispersed across several locations, leading to a fragmented architecture that is particularly challenging to manage.
Poor Identity Management Restricts Progress
Driving efficiency through new, resource-saving processes that can work more quickly and produce better results is the primary goal of digital transformation. Achieving meaningful outcomes is impossible without proper identity management, which is where identity data comes into play.
The primary concern is understanding how the organization’s identities relate to its employees. Employees in large enterprises often own dozens of different identities dispersed across numerous applications and systems with no mechanism in place to connect all the dots readily. Due to the countless unmanaged, redundant, and overprovisioned accounts, many businesses lose track of which users own which identities, opening up a massive attack surface for malicious actors. Abandoned accounts are easy targets for hackers, and those with excessively high access privileges can have a drastic impact.
In addition to the increased cyber risk, this is also very wasteful and inefficient, which prolongs the time taken for digital transformation and produces less impactful outcomes. Companies may be paying for dozens or even hundreds of accounts they don’t utilize in addition to spending time and money transferring inactive profiles to new digital platforms.
Also Read: Identity Management in the Cloud – Mitigating Security Concerns
A Single Source of Identity
A unified, single source for all identity data, otherwise known as an Identification Data Fabric, is necessary to control digital identity. Businesses need a single window of visibility for all identities to identify ghost accounts, duplicate profiles, and profiles with excessively high privileges.
The main difficulties brought on by fragmented digital identities can be overcome with the help of an Identity Data Fabric. Companies can obtain tremendous cost reductions by eliminating unnecessary licenses and accounts. Identity management is no longer a barrier to digital transformation, accelerating it and increasing project ROI. Furthermore, thousands of possible attack vectors are blocked, significantly lowering the firm’s risk exposure.
To get there, a highly automated method that can quickly find and gather identities from both on-premises legacy and cloud-based systems is necessary. A single profile is created by unifying related identities and mapping them to an abstraction layer. This ensures that each digital identity can be clearly traced back to a specific employee.
Importantly, instead of an application layer, this process needs to take place at the data layer. This ensures interoperability while preventing any process interference across the wide range of systems in the IT estate. Working at the data layer also extends the single point of control across numerous enterprises using different IT systems.
Companies can integrate new systems as part of their digital transformation without being hampered by ineffective, fragmented processes if they have control over their digital identities. Additionally, companies won’t have to worry about threat actors exploiting outdated and overlooked digital techniques as they develop and experiment with creative new digital strategies.
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