Some products are necessities – pretty much no business today could manage without Microsoft Office 365. Other things like hiring a video production company to do your corporate videos are conveniences (you can produce these yourself if you don’t want to spend much). Identity and Access Management is both a necessity and convenience. It is quickly becoming a necessity due to the competitive edge it offers, and the effects that it has on an organization are highly convenient!
Identity and Access Management comprises of 4 interrelated but independent modules. Single Sign-On (SSO) allows employees to sign in just once with a single password to access all the apps that they use regularly. Password Management handles password changes and resets. User Lifecycle Management (ULM) provides necessary accesses when an employee joins an organization (called birthright provisioning) and at every role change, promotion or transfer in his journey. Access Governance (AG) seeks to address critical questions such as ‘who has access to what’, create a system for orphan account management, etc.
Cross Identity CI is a powerful but compressed (and lightweight) all-in-one solution that addresses all these areas. Built for organizations with simple needs, it is also the first solution in the world to utilize our patented thick-client SSO technology.
The following matrix shows the benefits of CI in brief:
Single Sign-On: Experience enormous time and money savings (and user delight!) from signing-on only once to access all your apps. The solution ensures that employees automatically comply with company policies that state ‘no passwords written down on paper or saved to documents on laptops/mobile devices.’ The multifactor authentication in CI’s SSO ensures that authentication is near foolproof. And since just one password is required for all apps, an organization can set a stronger password policy without worrying about employees forgetting. All this elevates user experience. Let’s look at each benefit of the different modules in CI.
Password Management: Self-service Password Reset in CI eliminates the need for a human-powered helpdesk. This automation saves money, and employees also experience much lower lockout times. They can just use the system to reset their passwords for themselves. Traveling employees and/or those in different time-zones are also empowered to be productive at all times. Owing to this ease in resetting passwords, an organization using this solution can also enforce stronger
password policies. Authentication systems can also be implemented for password resets or changes. All this also improves user experience.
User Lifecycle Management: Without ULM it can take up a to a week for an organization to onboard a new user (induct her or him in the enterprise directory, create credentials and provision all necessary accesses). Our solution enables organizations to do all this within 10 minutes. It also features access requests and approval so that employees who need to access apps that are not defined for their role can quickly continue to be productive. CI’s ULM module allows organizations to enforce role-based access control and to comply with security and access policies.
Access Governance: Orphan accounts are those whose user has left the organization, but all its accesses are still intact. These are critical security threats as there is nobody to report a breach if the credentials become compromised. With our AG module, orphan account management becomes a easy – they are detected in real-time and deleted immediately. ‘Who has access to what’ reports are supremely important the internal security of an organization. As much as outside entities can compromise sensitive data, maniac employees can potentially wreak even greater havoc if they have access to apps and systems that they ought not to. With CI’s Access Governance module, Access Reviews and recertifications is easy.
CI is agile but powerful. It is user friendly yet has the necessary depth and complexity needed for an effective IAM solution. It has huge ROI (one customer reported an ROI of only 3 days!) and is competitively priced. It also has various features that exist nowhere else in the industry such as patented thick-client single sign-on technology. The solution is perfect for organizations that require simplified Access Governance and User Lifecycle Management such as SMBs and educational institutions. Learn more about CI here
