Are you ready to start your journey in Identity & Access Management?

Identity & Access Management (IAM) projects are often complex and costly initiatives, mainly driven by strong customizations and system integrations. The market is characterized by long implementation times, with process changes that require executive sponsorship. 

Traditional IAM solutions have been optimized for large enterprises and, in many cases, on-prem deliveries. Many companies, especially small and medium organizations, have tried to postpone the beginning of their IAM journeys because existing solutions are not designed for their needs.

There are several other reasons why companies delay their IAM journeys. The list includes, e.g., unclear identity owners; lack of IAM domain understanding; uncertainty about the company readiness; misunderstandings about project complexity; or the company is waiting for some other project to finish (e.g., HR, CRM, ERP).

On the other hand, due to today’s increase in remote work, threat landscape, EU regulations, and the need to manage digitalization with small IT teams have driven many small and medium organizations to speed up the introduction and adoption of IAM practices to ensure security and manage risks. But they often must consider new alternatives to the traditional IAM system offerings.

Reasons to start the IAM journey

1. Reducing manual IT work: Company structures are becoming a complex and highly dynamic ecosystem, including internal & external employees, multiple partners, and customers. For example, let’s think of a small company that works with a subcontractor with 200 employees who might join and leave daily. Due to these frequent changes, the manual process for creating, updating, and deleting users and their access rights becomes very inefficient and costly for small IT teams. As a result, it is expected that subcontractors do not get access to company IT platforms or physical assets, limiting their work efficiency.
2. Security and reputation: As the threat landscape evolves continuously, small and medium organizations have realized they need to take steps to protect their critical information and IT infrastructure. The integrity of their IT assets, reputation, and customers’ trust can be compromised by malicious applications and threats.
3. Regulation compliance: Regulators emphasize organizational data security as a crucial part of compliance. They have now realized that IT infrastructure is a prime target for hackers and the most significant source of security breaches. Today, organizational data security is moving to the forefront of compliance requirements, and regulatory bodies have introduced standards and laws related to data security and privacy practices. Fines for not complying with European regulation can be high. For example, GDPR fines can reach 4% of annual global turnover or €20 million.
4. User experience and improved profitability: Often, easy-to-use self-service portals for IAM tasks, such as requesting, updating, or deleting access rights, are non-existent or very limited in small and medium organizations. This is even truer when considering processes surrounding subordinates or creating and updating users. This means extra costs and manual tasks for IT departments, which could have easily been avoided.

Our Efecte team works every day with companies willing to start their IAM projects as soon as possible and companies who are hesitant or willing to postpone their IAM projects. We support both to prepare and accelerate their journeys.

Efecte's teams will support you to get ready to start

1. In organizations where identity owners are unclear, we can help you identify who decides how to manage different identities.
2. When the issue is related to a lack of IAM domain understanding, our experts will assist you and assess your readiness.
3. If there is fear of long and complex projects, we propose a phased and productized IAM approach, which starts easy and small with quick delivery.
4. There is no need to wait for a change in your ERP or HR systems. Updating system integrations after Efecte is deployed is not a long project.

Some examples of critical questions for you to prepare

• What user groups (e.g., permanent employees, temporal employees, partners, subcontractors, customers, etc.) do you want to manage? Usually, the organization’s Active Directory has been growing slowly and unstructured, without differentiation between internal and external employees. Additionally, it is also common that blue-collar employees are not included.
• Who starts (and where) the onboarding process for different user groups in the organization ecosystem? What is your expectation for the future? For example, if you need an external employee for project management, who decides how to do the onboarding process?
• Do you already have a list of applications you want to manage in the IAM solution? If not, we can help you to identify the list.
• Do you want to build a traditional "everything ready in one IAM project," or would you be ready for a productized approach with well-planned phases, working together and learning from each other?

Depending on your answers to these questions, we can estimate how quickly and easily you can implement the IAM basics and plan a clear IAM roadmap for your company.

Efecte provides an easy and viable IAM solution

Efecte’s Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) solution provides an easy and affordable approach to IAM, which allows you to:

1. Start with clear and firm steps: Efecte’s team can guide you through planning and preparing your company for an IAM project (when, why, how, who, what needs to be considered, etc.). Together we can identify identity owners, applications, users, and access rights to manage or work on process definition (e.g., processes to request and approve accesses).
2. Divide your IAM journey into well-planned phases: Efecte team can provide you with recommended phases in your journey, prioritizing the essential use cases and business outcomes (e.g., security and reputation, regulation compliance, or launching a new service efficiently) and related system integrations.
3. Be wise with costs: Efecte solution provides an affordable TCO, with ready-made off-the-shelf use cases packaged for different organizations’ requirements and quick wins.

Efecte IGA allows organizations to choose the solution that meets their needs:

• IGA Starter: designed to address the organizations’ needs at the start of their IAM journey. It includes essential use cases, reports & more pre-packaged for quick deployment.
• IGA Growth: designed & built to meet more demanding organization’s needs.
• IGA Enterprise: complete package including everything enterprises need to tackle identities & access rights management.

If you are interested in our step-by-step approach and want to hear more, you can contact us here!

Tommi Lattu works as Sales Director for Efecte since June 2019. He has a wide experience in both technical and commercial roles in various international positions in Finland and Spain. Tommi’s mission is to support organizations in all business sectors to digitalize and automate.