Operating and managing applications in both on-premise and cloud environments is not an easy task. And it is getting even more complicated as the scale of deployment increases and expands globally. It is important to have a clear understanding of how businesses can streamline the management of on-premise and cloud environments, reduce the time and cost required to support the hybrid environment, and use solutions that enable an organization to scale by making it easy to manage, control, and provide appropriate access for all end-users.
GS Lab | GAVS conducted a very insightful webinar on on-premise and cloud applications. This blog captures some key discussion points and takeaways from the webinar titled ‘How to Unify Access to On- Prem and Cloud Apps in Enterprises.’ The link to the entire webinar is available at the end of the blog.
Mr. Chris Veith, Director of Global Alliances, OneLogin, moderated the session. The panelists were: Mr. Gary Gwin, Senior Director of Product Management at OneLogin. He has over 25 years of experience in application security and identity access management. Mr. Mandar Garge, Global Cybersecurity Practice Head at GS Lab | GAVS. He has over 15 years of experience in the field of cybersecurity. He focuses on helping new companies leverage new technology to achieve breakthrough benefits for their organization.
In the era of digital transformation, there is upward growth when it comes to cloud-based applications. Many of the applications enterprises are adopting are on the cloud. While cloud applications are growing, however, a fair number of organizations are still looking to have on-premise applications. As a result, a hybrid environment becomes an important component of application management. Any application, irrespective of the place from where they are accessed, needs robust security measures. This is where IAM comes into play.
Identity Access Management (IAM) manages levels of authentication, user lifecycle within the organization, and more. The landscape of IAM is slowly growing, thus giving way to Unified Access Management. Consequently, this warrants a solution that can handle IAM for different assets across different geographies under one roof.
The Pain of Fragmentation
Today, most organizations manage complex application environments consisting of a growing portfolio of SaaS applications, and commercial off-the-shelf and custom web apps hosted on-premises, at remote data centers, and in private clouds. With conventional Identity and Access Management tools, organizations have little choice. They must manage access to these environments separately, resulting in a fragmented security approach. On the other hand, businesses using on-premise applications have IT leaders frustrated with existing Access Management programs for three simple reasons – maintenance, cost, and complexity.
There are several catalysts to move applications from the existing structure to the cloud – the complexity of the legacy system, the effort it takes to handle the current access management framework, the gap in finding the right people with the right skills, and restrictions in legacy system APIs.
Organizations with legacy WAM solutions will benefit from implementing an integrated IAM solution.
IAM Solutions
The current IAM market is filled with various vendors offering everything from individual services such as primary web access and password management to customer IAM and IDaaS. As the needs of the organization increase, there is also the option to look for solutions that offer multi-factor authentication, privileged access management, IGA, EMM, and integrated risk management. Choosing the right solution requires the business first to understand its security needs. Typically, the approach to security requirements starts with categorizing the needs into three categories -Basic IAM needs where all of the conditions are put in one bucket, including clearly defined access policies Advanced needs include federation, such as authentication of applications against one single source, single sign-on More advanced requirements, such as multi-factor authentication policies, privileged IAM to handle super users
When scouting for a vendor to handle access management requirements, it is vital to Choose a unified, cloud-based access management solution Identify security priorities before finding a vendor Develop a plan based on inventory and business security profile Select a vendor that can understand the access management landscape Automate workflows to handle specific security processes Implement an end-to-end solution where there is a centralized access management
This blog offers only a high-level gist of the webinar. Here, you can watch the entire discussion, including the poll questions and the experts’ take on audience questions.
GS Lab | GAVS periodically organizes insightful webinars empaneled with its tech leaders, the leadership team, and industry thought leaders to explore current and emerging trends. To watch all of our webinar recordings,
please visit https://www.gslab.com/webinars/
