All-In-One Identity Management and Cloud Security

Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM) is a legacy identity management solution that has been around for a while. Organizations have been leveraging Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM) to centrally manage user identities, automate user provisioning and de-provisioning because of its relatively easy integration within the Microsoft Ecosystem. While it has served many organizations well, it lacks some of the essential features that modern identity management software offers.

Here are a few of the key features that MiM is missing compared to modern identity management solutions:

1. Cloud-First Approach: 

   MIM was designed for on-premises environments, and while it can be extended to support cloud-based environments, it lacks the cloud-first approach that modern identity management solutions offer. This can make it challenging to manage hybrid environments or to take full advantage of the cloud's scalability and flexibility.

2. Flexible Identity Models: 

   MIM relies heavily on the Active Directory schema, which can limit its flexibility when it comes to managing non-AD identities such as contractors, partners, and customers. Modern identity management solutions offer more flexible identity models that can accommodate a wider range of identity types and sources.

3. Self-Service Provisioning:

   MiM requires significant manual intervention for account provisioning and access request workflows. Modern identity management solutions offer self-service capabilities that enable users to request and manage their own access, reducing the administrative burden on IT staff.

4. Access Governance: 

   MiM offers basic access control functionality but lacks the more advanced access governance features found in modern identity management solutions. This includes capabilities such as entitlement cataloging, risk-based access certification, and access analytics.

5. User Experience:

   MIM's user interface is complex and challenging to use, MiM’s frustrating User Interface is a common gripe amongst all its customers. Modern identity management solutions offer streamlined user experiences that are more intuitive and user-friendly, reducing the learning curve and improving user adoption.

In summary, while MIM has been a reliable identity management solution for many organizations, it lacks some of the essential features that modern identity management solutions offer. If you're looking for a more flexible, scalable, and user-friendly identity management solution, it's time to consider upgrading to a modern identity management platform such as EmpowerID.

EmpowerID is a next-generation identity and access management platform that provides unparalleled flexibility and scalability. With EmpowerID, you can easily manage identities, applications, and resources across your entire organization, regardless of size or complexity.

Here are just a few reasons why you should consider moving to EmpowerID:

1. Greater Flexibility: EmpowerID offers a highly configurable platform that can be customized to fit your organization's unique needs. With our flexible architecture and robust API, you can easily integrate EmpowerID with your existing systems and workflows.
2. Improved Security: EmpowerID provides comprehensive security features, including multi-factor authentication, role-based access control, and privileged access management. With EmpowerID, you can ensure that your organization's sensitive data and resources are protected from unauthorized access.
3. Simplified Administration and Self-Service: EmpowerID's intuitive user interface and streamlined workflows make it easy for administrators to manage user accounts, access requests, and other identity-related tasks. With EmpowerID, you can reduce the administrative burden on your IT team and improve overall efficiency.
4. Better User Experience: EmpowerID offers a seamless user experience, with a single sign-on portal that provides easy access to all of your organization's applications and resources. With EmpowerID, your users can enjoy a streamlined, hassle-free experience that improves productivity and reduces frustration.

So if you're looking for a powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use identity management solution, look no further than EmpowerID. Contact us today to learn more about how EmpowerID can help you take control of your organization's identity and access management needs.

If you are an ActiveRoles user, you know the value of a powerful and flexible Active Directory management solution. But as IT environments become more complex and diverse, managing identities and access across multiple systems and platforms requires a more comprehensive approach.

A modern Identity Governance solution provides more diverse features that understand the growing complexities of modern IT environments enabling deeper use cases than what you'd be limited by Quest Active Roles. While it provides many useful features for managing AD, it has quite a few limitations compared to other AD and identity governance platforms.

One of the biggest game-breakers with Active Roles is that it offers very limited functionality for Cloud users. While in theory, Quest can manage cloud users, but only to an extremely limited extent. The tool allows you to create and provision an AD user to a cloud system. However, the cloud system objects aren't inventoried and managed in the user interface, and you always need to have an AD user as your starting point for management.

This limitation can be problematic for organizations that rely heavily on cloud-based systems, as it creates an additional layer of complexity that may not be necessary. Without proper inventory and management of cloud-based users, organizations may struggle to maintain security and compliance standards.

1. Restrictive reporting and analytics capabilities:

   Quest ActiveRoles provides limited reporting and analytics capabilities, limited to just Users and Groups, as compared to other IGA Platforms that can provide in-depth and comprehensive analytics on every single AD Attribute. This severely limits you from getting a complete picture of your identity and access management activities.

2. Neglible support for non-Microsoft platforms:

   Quest Active Roles is designed to work only with Microsoft Active Directory environments and does not support other directory services. This can be a significant limitation for your organization if you use a mix of different platforms, such as Unix or Linux. 

3. Limited integration with other Systems and IAM solutions:

   Quest ActiveRoles does not integrate well with other IAM solutions, making it difficult for organizations to implement a comprehensive identity governance program. Active Roles also is limited to just being able to manage only your Active Directory, providing no way to manage users on other Systems and Applications. 

4. Finite automation capabilities:

   Quest ActiveRoles does not provide extensive automation capabilities, which can make it difficult for organizations to automate repetitive tasks and workflows. Users will have to rely on writing scripting to complete tasks, which, when managing directories with millions of groups, objects, and users, can make even small tasks take exponentially longer and more expensive.

5. Lacking Cloud readiness:

   ActiveRoles Server was designed to work with on-premises Active Directory environments, which is not ideal for organizations that are moving to the cloud or adopting hybrid environments. A modern Identity Management solution offers better cloud-ready features, such as support for multi-cloud environments and identity as a service (IDaaS) capabilities, reported missing in Quest ActiveRoles. 

6. Lacking essential Identity features:

   ActiveRoles Server lacks advanced features like identity governance, access certification, risk-based access control, and identity analytics that are essential for modern organizations to manage identity and access in complex environments. Self Service features such as Access Requests and Password Resets are shown to have saved organizations millions of dollars in helpdesk costs and are seen as a must for any good IGA platform.

EmpowerID offers a modern, web-based solution that goes beyond Active Directory management to provide full Identity Governance and Administration, Access Management, and Privileged Access Management capabilities. With EmpowerID, you can manage identities and access across on-premises and cloud-based systems, applications, and platforms, including Microsoft Azure, SAP, Oracle, and more.

EmpowerID's True Zero Trust administration for Azure and other platforms allows for fine-grained access controls and risk management, and its low-code identity orchestration engine allows for easy automation of complex business processes. EmpowerID's powerful RBAC and PBAC hybrid authorization engine provides efficient and flexible administration and runtime policy enforcement.

Not only does EmpowerID offer advanced capabilities beyond Active Roles, but it also offers the convenience and scalability of a modern SaaS platform. EmpowerID's modular licensing allows you to add or remove features as your needs change easily, and its cloud-based deployment means you can manage your identities and access from anywhere.

Don't settle for less with ActiveRoles - Make the switch to EmpowerID and experience the power and flexibility of a modern, web-based Identity Governance and Administration solution that goes beyond Active Directory management.

If you'd like to read more about Cloud Ready Identity Governance Platforms, we'd recommend our Whitepapers on these subjects: Siemens Case Study, Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) Report

Gartner Peer Insights is the market-leading peer-review platform by Gartner for comparing and rating enterprise technology solutions to ease decision-making making journeys for buyers.

We’re incredibly excited to share that EmpowerID ranks among the industry’s leading best-of-suite Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) providers on Gartner's Peer Insights.

More than 50% of our customers have given us a full 5 STAR recommendation on the peer-review website. Let’s see what they have to say about us!

"Simple and Easy to use Identity Management & Cloud Security Platform."

“EmpowerID - One of the Best Application Provisioning Platforms in the Market.”

"We have been able to accomplish more in 6 months with EmpowerID than in 2 years with our previous IAM platform."

“Flexible Pricing and Cost-effective”

“Ahead of its competitors in many things like its Quick Customer Support.”

“I like that it has increased our Workflow Efficiency.”

Read on Gartner to see what other customers think about EmpowerID's low-code orchestration platform!

EmpowerID has consistently emphasized our customers' needs in our products. We know that when they succeed with EmpowerID, we succeed. In this past year, as the vast majority of companies shifted towards remote work, EmpowerID was not only their partner to ensure a smooth and secure transition but also a guide in accelerating their digital transformation journey.

Our end-to-end support, starting from the platform itself and extending down the line to the entire Deployment support, is designed to ensure that our customers achieve the fastest time to value and grow their return on investment with EmpowerID right from Day One. Our products, such as Azure License Manager and Azure SCIM VDS, reflect all these ideals.

Identity Governance and Administration (IGA)

In Gartner’s Words, IGA or Identity Governance and Administration refers to managing “Access rights for Individuals, Roles, Groups, and identity repositories within organizations, both on-premises and in the cloud. Ensuring appropriate access to resources across highly connected IT environments.”

For an IGA platform, it is necessary to have a broad array of capabilities in order to meet the needs of the ever-growing complexities of modern organizations and IT Systems, these features that complete an IGA Suite are: Identity life cycle management, Entitlement management, Support for access requests; Workflow orchestration; Access certification Provisioning via automated connectors and service tickets; Analytics and reporting.

In 2020, Gartner chose to retire it’s incredibly viral Magic Quadrant for IGA. This was because the Magic Quadrant is designed to capture the most significant innovations in a particular market, but since IGA has already had it’s exponential growth phase, and has reached a state of maturity, it has made measuring improvements much more, but that doesn’t mean that growth has stopped. With the shifting of existing work models in the post-COVID world, IGA has seen growth and expansion to previously unimaginable heights.

IGA today has expanded and adapted to manage increasingly complex Identities spanning across different cloud platforms to provision access and entitlement of the vast repertoire of applications that modern enterprises use today in their ever-expanding workflows.

You can learn more about how EmpowerID competes in these ever-expanding domains in this all-new 2022 Leadership Compass Report by Kuppinger Cole, which examines the market for solutions that increase security in business application environments for managing cloud entitlements—measuring the growth of IGA and Access Management platforms beyond the traditional limit of imagination, taking a much more abstract and out-of-the-box approach to evaluate the needs of modern enterprises.

Check it out in the link below.

Munich, Germany & Online – September 13-16, 2021 – EmpowerID, a proven leader in helping organizations get identity and access management (IAM) right, with its global partner Avanade, are happy to announce that their long-standing customer, Siemens, a German multinational conglomerate and the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe, was recognized by industry-leading analyst firm, KuppingerCole, as the winner in the "IAM at Scale" category at this year's European Identity and Cloud Conference (EIC).

Siemens received the prestigious award for using the EmpowerID platform to manage one of the world's largest Azure AD installations. The client managed to protect vital assets while keeping the business running, which dramatically reduced IT response time and provided a vastly improved user experience for about 300,000 users.

EmpowerID automatically inventories, monitors, and automates the management of the following in the Siemens' environment:

• 3,000 Azure license requests per month
• 30,000,000 automated Azure License Service Assignments
• 2,000,000 accounts, including AD and Azure AD
• 2,000,000 Groups, including AD and Azure AD
• 50,000,000 Group memberships
• 900,000 Nested Group Memberships

The EmpowerID architecture and solution delivery always anticipate the growth and size of its customers, delivering a global solution for Siemens that simplified managing identities for hundreds of thousands of users and millions of accounts further.

EmpowerID's powerful policy engine automates the assignment of the appropriate M365 licenses to users joining the Siemens organization based upon their roles and attributes coming from authoritative upstream systems. This automation ensures that users are licensed appropriately and can be productive from Day One. The ongoing lifecycle management functionality monitors for user position changes and readjusts the user's license to the most appropriate at all times to meet their job requirements. Most importantly, EmpowerID will reclaim the license to optimize the license expenditure when a user leaves the organization. To enhance governance and enable 24/7 self-service, the EmpowerID IT Shop allows users to request optional licenses for which they are eligible. These requests can then be routed to the appropriate individuals for approval.

To deliver greater security and convenience to its users, Siemens is also rolling out Azure application onboarding using EmpowerID's user-friendly IT Shop interface. A Zero Trust approach empowers application owners to onboard applications in Azure without having direct access to the Azure portal or being granted high-risk privileged access. As a result, security at Siemens is considerably improved by having a reduced attack surface for their Azure infrastructure, all combined with a superior user experience.

About Siemens

Siemens AG (Berlin and Munich) is a technology company focused on industry, infrastructure, transport, and healthcare. From more resource-efficient factories, resilient supply chains, and smarter buildings and grids, to cleaner and more comfortable transportation as well as advanced healthcare, the company creates technology with the purpose of adding real value for customers. By combining the real and the digital worlds, Siemens empowers its customers to transform their industries and markets, helping them to transform every day for billions of people. Siemens also owns a majority stake in the publicly listed company Siemens Healthineers, a globally leading medical technology provider shaping the future of healthcare. In addition, Siemens holds a minority stake in Siemens Energy, a global leader in the transmission and generation of electrical power.

In fiscal 2021, which ended on September 30, 2021, the Siemens Group generated revenue of €62.3 billion and net income of €6.7 billion. As of September 30, 2021, the company had around 303,000 employees worldwide. Further information is available on the Internet at www.siemens.com.

About EmpowerID

EmpowerID is the award-winning all-in-one Identity Management and Cloud Security platform designed for people. With over two decades in the industry, EmpowerID today manages millions of identities for large enterprises from all verticals across the globe. The platform is deployable on-premise and in the Cloud and offers comprehensive provisioning, single sign-on, access governance, the deepest integration capabilities with on-premise and Cloud systems, including ServiceNow, Azure AD, and SAP, on the market, and all of this coupled with an industry-leading user experience that drives adoption.

Built on a single microservice identity fabric architecture for manageability and scalability, EmpowerID ships with a powerful API, a visual workflow designer, and over 1,000 ready-to-use workflows for rapid deployment. For more information, visit http://www.empowerid.com.

Do you have any questions? Reach out to Alexandre Spoerri

Alexandre Spoerri
Sales Director
Alexandre.Spoerri@empowerID.com
+1 614 956 9008
Or feel free to book a slot to chat: https://calendly.com/alexandre-spoerri

North America

T 877 996 4276 or +1 (614) 652-6825
E info@empowerID.com

Europe

T +49 69 667741 – 157 or +41 44 585 10 82
E Info_D@empowerID.com or Info_CH@empowerID.com

There has been some exciting news for those of us who have been following the evolution of Open Policy Agent as an new technology for distributed policy enforcement. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has announced that Open Policy Agent has demonstrated the maturing and adoption level to warrant graduation from its status as an incubating standard. This is a major accomplishment for the OPA team and community. At EmpowerID, we have been tracking its progress and integrating it into our external authorization offering.

CNCF Announcement: https://www.cncf.io/announcements/2021/02/04/cloud-native-computing-foundation-announces-open-policy-agent-graduation/

The CNCF describes OPA as follows: "OPA is an open source, general-purpose policy engine that enables unified, context-aware policy enforcement across the entire stack. The project was accepted into the CNCF sandbox in April 2018 and one year later was promoted to incubation. More than 90 individuals from approximately 30 organizations contribute to OPA, and maintainers come from four organizations, including Google, Microsoft, VMware, and Styra."

I've included a short video below of EmpowerID leveraging OPA in conjunction with another exciting standard for authorization, User Managed Access 2.0 (UMA).

Introduction and Authentication & Access Management 

Over the past 7 years, empowerID has been working closely with its global implementation partner, Avanade, on various large IAM projects across Europe, namely customers such as Henkel (Germany), Siemens (Germany), Energie aus der Mitte (Germany), Bank Julius Bär (Switzerland), Paccar/DAF (USA/Netherlands), Eurovia (France) and most recently Proximus (Belgium). 

Avanade has a very large security practice and supports the world’s leading CIOs and CISOs with putting in place the best Microsoft-based infrastructure to protect their data efficiently and in case of Cyber compromise recover safely and quickly. 

We have decided that it would be valuable for our readers to understand the collective of lessons learned and posed challenges that these leaders have been facing when it comes to Digital Identity. This series is structured as a discussion between Brandon Nolan, Global Digital Identity Lead at Avanade, Arno Zwegers, Regional Security Lead for Avanade in the Netherlands, and Patrick Parker, CEO at empowerID, and is divided into five key areas that will each be covered in 5 posts over the next 5 months. The five key areas will be  

• Authentication & Access Management;  
• Authorization;  
• Privileged Access Management;  
• Identity Governance;  
• Monitoring and Intelligence.  

In this first session, we will look at authentication and access management and address questions such as: 

• Should I use a single or multiple authentication directories? 
• How does the current infrastructure affect the authentication strategy? 
• What is currently the “best” form of authentication? 

You can read the first discussion on the Avanade Blog here: https://www.avanade.com/en/blogs/avanade-insights/security/identity-challenges-and-lessons/?utm_source

Next month, we will continue our conversation on the topic of authorization. We hope to have you with us again then. 

Summary

Context: The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) struck down the EU-US Privacy Shield (Privacy Shield) as a valid mechanism to comply with EU data protection requirements when transferring personal data from the EU to the US. The CJEU continues to view standard contractual clauses (SCCs) as a valid mechanism in the abstract, though this may be challenged on a case-by-case basis if the circumstances surrounding the transfer impinge on the adequate level of protection afforded by the SCCs.

The Dot Net Factory, LLC dba EmpowerID action: In light of the CJEU’s ruling, The Dot Net Factory, LLC dba EmpowerID updated our Data Processing Addendum to, among other things, incorporate SCCs where required for the transfer of personal data outside of the EU or the UK. We are also continuing to monitor for further guidance from the EU supervisory authorities, including on any supplementary measures that we may undertake as a data importer.

Ongoing commitments: The Dot Net Factory, LLC dba EmpowerID upholds high standards of privacy and security for customer data. As such, we reiterate our commitment to provide for increased customer control over where their cloud data is stored and restrict access to such data, and to never sell customer data. In addition, we aim to be transparent with our customers about government requests that we receive for their data.

Background on changes to legal mechanisms for EU-US data transfer

On July 16, 2020, the CJEU invalidated Privacy Shield in the Schrems II case (also known as Data Protection Commissioner v. Facebook Ireland and Maximillian Schrems). Privacy Shield was a voluntary program developed to enable companies to self-certify adherence to certain privacy protections for the transfer of personal data from the EU to the US. It was implemented to replace the Safe Harbor framework, which was struck down by the CJEU in 2015 and has since been operated by the US Dept. of Commerce. The recent CJEU decision echoes that of the 2015 ruling, concluding that US national security surveillance laws and programs are in conflict with Europeans’ fundamental right to privacy, and that the Privacy Shield did not provide an adequate level of protection or remedy to EU data subjects.

Although the CJEU invalidated Privacy Shield, the CJEU concluded that the SCCs, issued by the European Commission, continue to be a valid mechanism for companies to transfer personal data outside the EU, but may be challenged on a case-by-case basis, especially where national security laws conflict with the guarantees provided by the data importer in such clauses. As such, the CJEU noted that it’s the primary responsibility of the data exporter and data importer to assess whether supplemental measures are necessary to ensure an adequate level of protection, but did not specify what such supplemental measures could be. The European Data Protection Board recently also issued a statement that it’s analyzing the CJEU’s decision and expects to issue further guidance on what those supplemental measures could consist of.

The Dot Net Factory, LLC dba EmpowerID actions in the wake of Schrems II

Since this landmark ruling, The Dot Net Factory, LLC dba EmpowerID has taken immediate steps to ensure minimum disruption for our customers, including updating our Data Processing Addendum to incorporate SCCs to the extent required under applicable data protection law. The Data Processing Addendum also enumerates our commitments to security, confidentiality of processing, limitations on international transfers of personal data, cooperation with data subjects’ rights, notice of security incidents, and more.

Over the coming months, we anticipate the EU supervisory authorities to issue additional guidance on how to comply with the new legal landscape after the Schrems II decision, including what the supplementary measures could consist of. In addition, the current form of the SCCs were written before GDPR went into effect and may be due for an official revision; we continue to keep a close eye on forthcoming guidance to stay up to date.

In the meantime, we continue to uphold our obligations and commitments to our customers under our contracts, under GDPR, and under the Privacy Shield framework for the data we collected and transferred under that framework.

The Dot Net Factory, LLC dba EmpowerID’s ongoing commitment to privacy and security

While the CJEU’s ruling on the Privacy Shield complicates EU-US data transfers, it changes little regarding the paramount importance The Dot Net Factory, LLC dba EmpowerID places on the privacy and security of our customers’ data. The Dot Net Factory, LLC dba EmpowerID maintains a robust security and privacy program that is outlined in detail on our Trust page.

Importantly, The Dot Net Factory, LLC dba EmpowerID does not sell, rent, or trade customers’ personal data. When The Dot Net Factory, LLC dba EmpowerID accesses data hosted in the EU, it is in service to our customers, such as: to provide our customers 24/7 technical support for their most critical issues, to deliver the right security solutions or to optimize their experience. The Dot Net Factory, LLC dba EmpowerID also gives customers control over where their cloud data is stored regionally. In addition, The Dot Net Factory, LLC dba EmpowerID redirects to the customer any government requests for their data that we may receive, and contractually commits to providing advance written notice of any compulsory requests to access their data unless prohibited by law from doing so.

The Dot Net Factory, LLC dba EmpowerID remains committed to maintaining the highest levels of privacy and security for our customers, and will continue to drive enhancements to our data protection safeguards. For more information about our security and privacy program, please email privacy@empowerid.com.

KuppingerCole, a respected global analyst focused on Information Security, examined 24 vendors in the Identity as a Service, Business to Enterprise market (IDaaS B2E) market.  EmpowerID was named as a Product Leader, a category which ranks vendors by functional strength and completeness of solution.  KuppingerCole stated in the report that EmpowerID "delivers a very broad feature set for Identity and Access Management, going well beyond Identity Provisioning but with tight integration to these core features."

KuppingerCole further recognized EmpowerID as an Innovation Leader, a measure of the platform's support for "leading-edge new features which deliver emerging customer requirements," and finally as an Overall Leader which measures leadership across all the factors they evaluate.

KuppingerCole noted that EmpowerID "takes a unique approach to IAM/IAG. It is built from scratch on a Business Process Management/Workflow platform" and the ability to modify and create visually designed workflows, "allows for great flexibility, while the product also delivers a broad set of out-of-the-box features."

Among top product leaders, EmpowerID differentiates itself by its innovative "everything is a workflow" approach to Identity and Access Management. Of EmpowerID, KuppingerCole stated "EmpowerID is a very interesting and innovative solution. It provides a well thought-out and flexible approach for Cloud IAM/IAG with strong Identity Federation and authentication support."

KuppingerCole also assigned EmpowerID the strongest ratings possible for the security, interoperability and usability subcategories of the Leadership Compass report.

The strength of EmpowerID's industry leading Identity and Access Management, Governance and Privileged Access Management feature set is derived from its all-in-one approach. It uses a single codebase, a common management console, and modern HTML5 adaptive user interfaces to combine high scalability and performance into a superior user experience. EmpowerID offers an Identity Warehouse to manage employee, partner, and consumer identities which are automated and secured by an Adaptive Authentication Engine, a powerful RBAC/ABAC engine, and over 750 out of the box workflows.

The breadth of EmpowerID's platform allows enterprises around the globe to extend their boundaries and to manage internal and client identities in on-premise, Cloud and hybrid environments.