5 crucial facts that you must know about identity and access management

IAM is IT-centric.

Identity and access management (IAM) may appear easy to some, but in reality, it is very tricky. Proper IAM is the key to a healthy environment because it provides the ability to create, manage, and delete objects. If this truly is so easy, why are administrators across the globe ranting about this topic? Where’s the missing piece in this very important puzzle?

Although they may have once been the standard, older policies and procedures aren’t efficient and can’t necessarily protect your environment. However, there’s no right balance between security and efficiency; the old school approach provides security because it delays outputs, while the newer approaches allow for immediate access but easily tips an environment out of compliance.

With ManageEngine’s IAM offering(AD360), you can bring together identity and access management across platforms and devices in the most efficient, easy-to-use, and secure way possible.

Empower your organization without restricting productivity.

Clinical object provisioning and de-provisioning.

Efficient object provisioning and deprovisioning reduces an organization’s security issues, but how? By keeping it simple, yet systematic. An organization should provide adequate permissions through a meticulous onboarding and offboarding process. Improving business performance by provisioning just enough access to their users.

Consider the following scenario: HR raises a ticket to provision a user—an everyday activity in most organizations—but they constantly get held up at each step in the process. Raising a ticket seems like a simple task, but a whole lot actually goes into it. The ticket gets assigned to a help desk technician, who then triggers a user creation ticket (in Active Directory and other platforms used by the organization). The initial ticket will go through in numerous loops before being resolved. Instead, wouldn’t it be nice to create the user with precise access rights and definitions across platforms right from your help desk tool? AD360 has got you covered!

AD360’s latest integration with two widely used help desk tools—ServiceNow (ServiceNow is a leading on-demand, cloud-based IT service management solution) and ServiceDesk Plus (ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus is a comprehensive Help Desk and Asset Management software)—allows user provisioning and deprovisioning straight from the service catalog. It does this through an intuitive template, which contains respective information from multiple platforms.

To spice things up, even more, AD360 offers Active Directory (AD) APIs to let you integrate AD management capabilities into your help desk tool.

Automate your IAM skillfully.

IAM’s business value depends on how skillfully an organization automates activities around their environment. If the provisioning process is not automated, new hires could spend numerous unproductive hours— or days— waiting to get access to key applications and resources. Additionally, users could gain unauthorized access to applications and data, even after they leave the company if they’re not deprovisioned correctly. Beyond provisioning and deprovisioning, permission management and other routine tasks can also be automated.

AD360 identifies 14 crucial and oft-repeated Active Directory tasks spread across four different categories (User Creation, User Modification, Computer and Contact Management, and Group Modification) and offers controlled automation for each of them.

Role-based access.

Role management organizes users’ access rights based on different responsibilities across an enterprise. For instance, a company might create separate roles for different kinds of jobs, assigning employees system access rights and security levels that match their unique responsibilities. As a user’s role changes, so do their access permissions.
What makes an administrator go crazy is how nuanced some technologies are. The more options a technology provides, the more difficult it becomes to track, meaning the administrator’s job boils down to effective permission management and monitoring.

How does AD360 handle permission management for you?

All user role changes come with respective permission changes. With a completely customizable template, AD360 allows you to monitor a particular field and provide respective permissions.

For example, when a user is moved from support to the sales department, their existing group membership should change. Additionally, information about their reporting manager and other important attributes should also change. AD360′ intelligent filters let you decide and customize how these changes should look and work by automatically looking for attribute changes and adding additional corresponding values.AD360 provides more options for permission changes such as automation, bulk updates, and more.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could empower your end users to request access permissions? What if they could be looped to a workflow where every ticket is monitored and audited? Before providing access, technicians could even validate the request and then grant access. With the integration within AD360, users can request access permissions themselves.

Easy password management with single sign-on (SSO) and two-factor authentication.

An access management platform, such as AD360, allows users to log in just once to gain access to multiple IT resources across the enterprise. AD360 does this by offering a centralized single sign-on (SSO) solution for securely logging in and synchronizing passwords across your IT infrastructure.

Give your users one-click access to cloud applications.

AD360′ SSO feature integrates users’ cloud accounts with their Active Directory (AD) account so they can enjoy a consistent logon process across apps. This means that they don’t have to deal with passwords of varying lengths and complexities. End users can easily access all their cloud accounts with just their AD or Windows credentials.

AD360 now offers two-factor authentication for password resets and password changes, which increases security and reduces risk exposure by ensuring domain users’ credentials don’t fall prey to attackers.

Govern access for compliance.

Access governance and IT regulatory compliance are two of the most used terms across industries, and governing access tops the list for any IT team. Access governance is the ability to govern who has access to what within an organization and is considered much stronger than access management protocols.

Users of IAM solutions are discovering that they need more visibility into who can access their organization’s key resources and how. They also need additional layers of data to measure the outcomes and impact of the provided access.

AD360 offers out-of-the-box compliance reports covering Active Directory permissions, NTFS and share permissions, and more. These reports can be generated on a schedule and in turn, can automate certain tasks.

Wondering what’s AD360?

AD360 is an integrated identity and access management (IAM) solution from ManageEngine that allows you to provision, modify, and deprovision user identities, and control user access to network resources. AD360 encompasses ADManager Plus and ADSelfService Plus, offering one console for effective IAM management.

Sign up for a free IAM kit from ManageEngine.

For further assistance, you can reach out to us at ad360-support@manageengine.com