The challenges of legacy identity platforms

The post-COVID world constantly challenges businesses to ensure a secure work-from-home model while catering to the growing need for accessing cloud applications. The idea that identity governance should remain on-prem has been around for quite some time now, probably because physical hardware within the confines of premises can create a sense of regulation and security. Though potentially more customizable, this approach often leads to critical errors in management and maintenance of the IAM (Identity Access Management) infrastructure and even permeates into onboarding and off-boarding procedures.

Why move your identity management to the cloud?

The framework of legacy on-premises IAM solutions such as enterprise Single Sign On (SSO), Virtual Private Network (VPN), or web access management often has limited capabilities. It supports a relatively small number of employees, restricting access to applications beyond the on-premises network perimeter. Further, in-house governance of identities is expensive, time-consuming, difficult to manage, and comes with its own set of risks involving people, processes, and products. From network overloads in directing cloud access traffic through an on-prem platform; to creating a possible single point of failure by relying on a VPN for cloud access; to the exponential costs incurred due to the maintenance of legacy solutions, the problems of maintaining an on-premises IAM for secure access of cloud applications are a-plenty. These cumulative issues, along with the incremental infrastructure costs and operational costs for management and support, have made the choice of migrating their on-premises legacy applications to the cloud a no-brainer for businesses. Moreover, the proliferation of cloud-based apps and distributed computing models have created a gap in the market where legacy IAM can no longer meet the needs of modern identity platforms.

The cloud benefits

Migrating your legacy IAM to the cloud can prove to be a more flexible, secure, and cost-effective solution that supports a wide array of systems, providers, and platforms through a centralized console and is future-forward.

Let us take stock of the benefits that a real-world enterprise cloud platform like Savyint offers to get a clear understanding of the exponential rewards that you can reap.

• A single platform to manage identity, risk, and access across all business resources. Onboarding happens in minutes, with the selective provision of access and governance functions.
• The design enables rapid development and configuration to support deployment in weeks. Leveraging the existing industry integrations and templates enable configuration without complex coding. 
• The Zero Trust framework manages access dynamically and automatically, with just-in-time privilege elevation and time-bound access for any human and machine identity.
• The assurance of continuous compliance and evolving industry regulations simplify audits while a sustainable risk management and automated controls monitoring system reduces fraud.
• The flexible, open platform integrates easily with the entire IT ecosystem, offering the advantage of leveraging the pre-built rulesets, templates, and control and the capability to build custom identity workflows and connectors.

Establishing the point with a case study

The need to transform

A leading cloud-based provider of integrated digital human capital and business solutions had an outdated identity program that was almost 18 years old. The legacy platform had been through various acquisitions and divestitures and constantly added disjointed adhesive patches to keep it functional. The platform's different instances ran different versions that were out of support, and all these issues snowballed into huge infrastructure debt. The company realized that they were spending almost 40% of their IAM budget on fixing infrastructure problems unrelated to IAM, like server and OS upgrades. It was clear that the company needed a more efficient and streamlined platform and took this opportunity to leap to the cloud and be future-ready.

The cloud journey

Within four months of starting its transformation journey, the company could already connect its HR system. The following two months saw the company complete provisioning for their four directories plus Azure entitlements for licensing while onboarding applications. They completed the onboarding of around 300 applications in less than a year, with the high point being the onboarding of a whopping number of 150 applications in just one day! By harnessing the power of Saviynt's factory model, the company will continue the transition to a managed services model by operationalizing the platform and ensuring that they continue to expand their program's footprint to help out the customers who are the application owners in the environment. 

The business bottom line

• 70 – 80% reduction in user fulfilment tickets for NetIQ integrated and client apps
• 50% cost benefit in comparison to NetIQ
• TCO: ~$5.09 / enterprise user + $1.34 / client user (B2B)
• Subscription-based model – no perpetual license required
• Savings on platform support efforts through IAM Consolidation from Work Bench and NetIQ to Saviynt
• TCO savings vs. legacy IAM on infrastructure/maintenance costs – Saviynt being a cloud-based IAM Platform
• Regulatory Compliance – FedRAMP, SOC1/SOC2 certified. Out-of-the-box compliance reporting. Superior risk analytics
• Improved Efficiency – Reduced automation build time. Intelligent certifications/peer Analytics.

Shift from business operations protector to enabler

The traditional perception of security has been about meeting a checklist of defending business operations. However, a more extensive security goal, especially in identity access management, is to enable business operations rather than just protecting them. Moving your legacy identity management platform to the cloud does not only provide efficiency, flexibility, enhanced security, and cost benefits. I starts your strategic journey towards being a business operations enabler rather than a mere defender by enabling your security posture with the power of cloud-based IAM.