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2017/02/19
19 Feb, 2017

[Article] Six Business Benefits of Identity and Access Management

  • WSO2 Team
  • Content Writer - WSO2

Identity and access management (IAM) is no longer just about managing employees but also encompasses customers, partners, suppliers, and devices. It enables you to provide a seamless experience to all users of your system while making sure that security is the highest priority.

Enterprise Strategy Group recently published a research report on ‘A Cybersecurity Perspective on Identity and Access Management’1 that discovered 87% of enterprise organizations say their cyber security team has become more involved with IAM policy, process, and technology decisions and operations over the past two years.

With this increased focus on security, IAM solutions are becoming an integral part of a digital business’ success and are central to managing the identities of people, applications, and devices.



Allows easy access anywhere

People are increasingly using their social IDs to access services and resources. You need to be able to reach your users through any platform and allow them easy access to your services through their existing digital identities.

Bring your own identity (BYOID) is a concept that allows users to access your system through their own identities. By implementing such a concept, you can remove all barriers to entry and let employees, customers and partners alike easily and securely access your business capabilities anywhere and at any time.



Connect everyone to everything

Connecting with people, applications and devices is a key requirement of digital transformation. When doing so you also need to think of the increased security threats that this brings about.

An IAM solution can manage the complexities of connecting with most popular identity providers such as Salesforce, Twitter, Google. It does this while enforcing strict security policies with multi-factor and strong authentication. You also need to be future-proof so make sure you will be able to extend your solution and connect to any new identity providers that come up later on. Check out WSO2 Identity Server's comprehensive list of connectors.



Improve employee productivity

When you hire a new employee, they need to go through a certain process. They need to be given access to specific parts of your system, given a new device and provisioned into the enterprise. This process, if done manually, can take a long time, in turn reducing the employee’s ability to start work faster.

Automated provisioning helps speed up the process of granting new employees access to the required parts of your system. With self-service provisioning, existing employee can easily access different parts of the system without waiting to ask your IT team for permission.



Enhance user experience

Today, people don’t have the time to remember multiple different usernames and passwords. Instead, they expect to use one identity to log in to multiple different systems.

Your system might be made up of a lot of different internal and external applications, all having different access methods. With single sign-on (SSO) and unified identity, your customers and partners can access different areas of your system with one account ensuring you provide a seamless user experience.



Secure all aspects of your brand

When connecting with many identity providers across application the risk of a breach is higher. You need to cover all your bases and think of all security aspects of the system.

With multi-factor and strong authentication you can make sure that the identities that access your system are fully verified. Which parts of your system these IDs can access should also be controlled through grant types. By monitoring your system through analytics, running fraud detection and using alerting functions you can know when your business is at risk in real-time ensuring quick action is taken against any risks.



Increase business agility

In this fast-paced world, you need to be an agile business that can adopt Software as a Service offerings such as Salesforce, Concur, Google Apps and GoToMeeting fast.

With SSO, provisioning and centralized authorization management, you can allow easy secure access to these systems without creating additional security silos.

Today, WSO2 serves as a trusted technology partner for some of the world’s largest enterprises engaging in digital transformation initiatives. The company provides software purposely designed to meet today’s demands for an agile approach to API management, integration, identity and access management, smart analytics, and IoT.

WSO2 Identity and Access Management is a complete solution, which leverages technology that currently manages billions of user identities at customer sites. Read our case study on how ELM manages identities of 4 million government program users with WSO2 Identity Server to learn more.



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  • WSO2 Team
  • Content Writer
  • WSO2