Identity Management Open Day

The Problem with Identity Management

Take a moment now and cast your mind over the technology your organisation uses... You have multiple systems from multiple vendors which somehow need to work together for the people in your organisation. You would think that with only one set of people to look after that this would be easy, wouldn't you? But the truth is it's not...

Connecting people with the technologies they use is the essence of Identity Management.

Proprietary systems often look nice and have some great features, but they also come with a big price tag and don't often serve well to the systems outside the particular vendor's stable of products. In most organisations this means multiple sources of user accounts, which naturally leads to it's own problems. Managing system users becomes a management problem - simply adding a user means visits to multiple places on multiple machines, synchronising passwords, platforms and permissions and switching things on here and off there... and when a user leaves it's even worse! (did you ever forget to delete an account in one of the twelve places is was set up?)... And of course when users are locked out of the systems they need to work on, that's when the fun really begins...

Surely they've figured it out by now?

Proprietary Identity Management has promised much, but delivered little. Proprietary vendors treat Identity Management like some kind of secret sauce, some will even add non-standard extensions to otherwise standard protocols to make interoperability with products outside the vendors own stable of products a real headache. And when the proprietary directory doesn't work out-of-the-box like they said it would then good luck getting it to play nicely with your setup. It will need tuning, it will need adjustment, and... hey, what did they say their advantage over Open Source was?

Perhaps the biggest lack of charm of the proprietary route is the complete absence of 'economic scalability'. What we mean by that is that your identity needs always grow, usually exponentially. And in the age of online systems with tens or hundreds of thousands of users, or even millions, you should expect that right from the start. If you are being locked into a proprietary pricing model scalability is only one of your problems.

Each vendor, quite naturally of course, wants you to use their products and only their products. It's simply the way of the world. Proprietary products are usually designed as one-way streets - you put your stuff in, and it gets locked up and stays there. We call it proprietary lock-in, and it is meant to keep you using that particular product, and make it hard to nearly impossible to move away. Identity Management is a problem for you, but a sales tool for your vendor... the problem is not going to be solved that way...

But it's possible, right?

You can have a single Identity Management solution that serves all of your platforms and technology stacks irrespective of vendor, and serves them all in the same way. This integration has been achieved in several Open Source solutions, which means not only can you get equal service for all your systems and reduce your complexity, but you can do it at greatly reduced cost and even eliminate per-user and licencing fees.

What's different now?

The real trick is in knowing how to use the outstandingly great Open Source products out there to their best ability, and to reduce the complexity of your Identity Management infrastructure. Sirius has implemented and supported Open Source Identity Management solutions for almost 15 years at great companies like Specsavers, Kepak, and Markit, as well as Public Sector organisations like YHGfL and the National Digital Resource Bank. We can show you how. We can also support or even run the system for you.

Next steps...

Come to our Open Day, where not only will we feed you at our delicious Barbecue on our sunny Surrey campus by the side of the historic Wey Canal, you will learn all about Open Source Identity Management solutions and how you can use them.

We have assembled the UK's leading Open Source experts, drawn from us and our partners, as well as a leading Sirius client who will relate their experience of using Open Source Identity Management successfully for a decade. We also have respected industry analyst Puni Rajah for deep insight into the market. You can read more about the open day here. Read Agenda and Speaker Biographies.

Register online to reserve your place.

For more on Sirius' Identity Management solutions right now keep browsing, or simply talk to us.