MiMvsEmpowerIDArticle

Posted by Aditya Taneja on Wed, May 24, 2023

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.

EmpowerIDvsMiMs

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.

Upgrade from Microsoft Identity Manager Today!

Tags: Active Directory, authentication, IAM, Access Governance, 2-Factor, authorization, Azure security

2022 Gartner® Peer Insights Review Guide for EmpowerID’s Identity Governance and Administration

Posted by Aditya Taneja on Mon, Dec 26, 2022

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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!
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"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.”

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

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.

DREAM CIEM

 

Tags: authentication, IAG, IAM, Identity Management, Identity and Access Management (IAM), cloud security, Magic Quadrant, Gartner

EmpowerID Inserts Intelligence into 2013 SharePoint People Picker

Posted by Chris Hayes on Wed, Jun 24, 2015

EID SP

The SharePoint 2013 People Picker is the tool you use to find and select users, groups and claims to grant someone a permission to a site in SharePoint.  The SharePoint 2013 People Picker is heavily dependent on how authentication is configured for your site so you need to ensure your SAML or claim provider is intelligent.

Don't let this happen to you

All claim providers created equally!

Today the most common issue SharePoint administrators find with an authentication claim provider is that any name you type in the People Picker, SharePoint will accept.  Even worse, with a typical claims provider you can type nonsense and you will see two results, neither of them valid!

Not Valid

Credit:Kirk Evans Microsoft Blog

This is not because the SharePoint People Picker needs to be fixed, it's working as designed, it is a result of the claim provider.

The EmpowerID SharePoint Manager solves this problem, we have created the most intelligent claim provider in the market today.  In doing so we set out to do 4 things which will have a huge impact on the day to day operations of your SharePoint site.


1. Create the most intelligent claim provider in the world.  We didn't stop at providing intelligent responses to the query, we also segregate the data so that delegated administrators can only view results for data that they can see.  This is a very important point, if a business partner administrator wants to grant someone rights to a site the EmpowerID data filtering and masking is still maintained.

Screen Shot 06 24 15 at 10.18 AM

2. Provide SharePoint "web parts".  This is technology that allows users to find new sites and request access to it.  It also allows site administrators to approve site access, all directly within SharePoint.Screen Shot 06 24 15 at 10.09 AM
3. Fully support federated or claims based authentication into SharePoint.  Users can authenticate with EmpowerID, bring their own social identity or use another.

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4. Answer the "Why" question.  Why does someone have access and when was it granted?  The other side a SharePoint claim provider is tracking these finer details.  EmpowerID includes full certification and attestation for SharePoint access, this provides your enterprise with a host of risk controls not previously available.

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Want to know more?

Watch a previously recorded webinar that discusses these points here

click the button to request more information.

Request a Demo
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Tags: Single Sign-on (SSO), authentication, Governance and Regulatory Compliance, Federation, User provisioning, Data Governance, Attestation, consumers, SAML, SharePoint, Access Governance, SSO

Data breaches continue to grow in Healthcare sector

Posted by Chris Hayes on Tue, May 26, 2015

Internal employees continue to pose biggest risk in security breaches.

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Latest Experian security forecast - Cost of breaches in the healthcare industry could reach $5.6 billion annually.

How will the next identity spill happen?  The latest Experian data breach industry forecast points to your employees being the biggest threat.  Stronger external authentication and tighter protocols continue to miss the mark.  Employee negligence will continue to be the leading cause of security incidents in 2015.

Experian goes on to state that Healthcare breaches will continue to grow this year.  With the huge challenge of securing such a significant amount of data, the problem becomes even more serious when organizations are faced with a shortage of internal expertise.  With the majority of breaches originating from inside company walls, the report clearly indicates business leaders need to fight the root cause of data breaches rather than buy the latest security widgets.

What are some steps that you can take in your organization to prevent the next identity spill?

Preforming regular certification/attestation of access – At any time you need to be able to snapshot the access granted to a resource by roles, locations and person accounts.  Security assignments should be automated, but access should be certified and routed to an appropriate authorized person for review.  This review should verify the access and certify if it is valid or not.  A tool like EmpowerID makes certifications easy for the organization with scheduled certification and attestation policies that can be run and audited.

Implement automated provisioning/deprovisioning – Role based or attribute based access needs to be automatically and immediately provisioned or deprovisioned.  When an employee’s role changes, the resultant set of access needs to be calculated instantly.  Some application and resource access will be taken away and some will be granted.  Absence of role based deprovisioning is a root cause of an employee having too much access.  EmpowerID takes provisioning to the next level by allowing you to provision and deprovision based upon roles in the organization.

Implement RBAC & ABAC controls - You need an RBAC/ABAC engine to continuously evaluate how much access someone should or shouldn't have.  EmpowerID uses a hybrid approach with RBAC and ABAC adding in rules and even Separation of Duties enforcement.

Control access to applications via a central identity provider - Having users log into apps with a separate username and password is a recipe for disaster.  An IdP allows you to centrally validate someone’s identity and then assert that identity into applications wherever they are.  The EmpowerID IdP allows employees to search for applications that are granted for their role, removes ones that are not granted and provides the SSO into the application.

Provide Self-Service password reset - Let's face it, this not only tightens up security, but saves a lot of money.  EmpowerID provides full detailed audit trails of anything account related such as who changed the password, who approved it and more.

Implement strong authentication, regardless of the application - There are a lot of ways to get into your network.  The VPN, the email server and SaaS applications are all exposed entries into the protected network.  Do they all have the same authentication capabilities?  You need an authentication service that supports all the protocols, not just those most used.  EmpowerID can step up authentication at any level for any service.  The VPN, the routers, the SaaS apps, SharePoint, it doesn't matter.

The bottom line is this, an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.  According to Experian the average cost per lost record is just under $200 dollars, with average total impact cost to your organization just under $4 million.  Click through below and let us show you how easy it is to automate access and control privilege in your environment.

Request a Demo

Tags: GRC, authentication, IAG, IAM, Identity and Access Management (IAM), Access Governance

EmpowerID Named Overall Leader in IAM / IAG Suites

Posted by Patrick Parker on Thu, Feb 05, 2015

Rating graph

EmpowerID has been recognized as a three time leader in a recent KuppingerCole report evaluating Identity and Access Management (IAM) / Identity Access Governance (IAG) Product Suites.

The IAM/IAG Leadership Compass “focuses on complete IAM/IAG (Identity Access Management/Governance) suites that ideally cover all major areas of IAM/IAG as a fully integrated offering,” Martin Kuppinger wrote in the report.

KuppingerCole, a respected global analyst focused on Information Security, examined Identity and Access Management / Governance Suites for this report. They specifically evaluated products that are integrated solutions with a broader scope than single-purpose products. Martin Kuppinger concluded in the report, “With their Windows-based product they [EmpowerID] offer one of the best integrated IAM Suites. All components have been built by EmpowerID, allowing for tight integration into a well thought-out architecture. This integrated approach is a clear strength of EmpowerID."

To request an unabridged copy of the the KuppingerCole report on IAM/IAG Suites, please visit http://info.empowerid.com/download-the-free-kuppingercole-iam-suites-leadership-compass.

Tags: Role Based Access Control (RBAC), GRC, authentication, IAG, IAM, Group Management, Governance and Regulatory Compliance, Identity Management, Federation, User provisioning, Attestation, Separation of Duties, Identity and Access Management (IAM), Access Governance

B2C Single Sign On & Identity Management That Wins Over Consumers

Posted by Bradford Mandell on Mon, Oct 20, 2014

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Organizations that manage successful brands know what their customers want from a website experience and are able to provide it.

Consumers want simpler processes.  

They want a quick, seamless authentication experience. 

They want to get to a site from any device that is handy at the time, whether it’s a pc, a tablet or a smartphone.

They have lots of choices and they are bombarded with lots of information. Your branding must be visible and the flow of your customer through your site must be smooth so they will have a positive experience, remember you and want to return.

And your security for their identity needs to protect them and you without being obtrusive.

Your prize, if you capture consumers with a well-designed web presence, is a solid foundation for  business growth, faster fulfilment of your clients’ needs, and substantially greater efficiencies that can  reduce costs and drive profitability.

And of course you are supposed to accommodate all that and keep to a modest IT budget… phew!  

Here’s what it’s going to take:

  • A highly scalable Single Sign On (SSO) and Identity and Access Management (IAM) platform – one that can take you where your ambition wants to go.  Your IAM infrastructure may need to manage millions of users and tens of thousands of logins an hour.
  • Flexible branding – the login process can’t be generic, it and related Single Sign On (SSO) pages need to be customizable to your themes.
  • Support for social media logins is a must if you want to simplify the user experience and entice the widest number of users possible.
  • Self-service password reset and challenge questions that allows consumers to quickly get back in to your site if they forget their username or their password.
  • 2nd factor authentication capabilities and even identity validation will be needed if you need to provide an extra level of protection for your data or resources.  You may want the ability to step up authorization when a user needs to access more sensitive information.
  • A flexible API is another core need – on that can be embedded into your existing applications to connect to common authentication, provisioning and authorization processes.
  • You will want a licensing model that scales from a modest user base to one that is still affordable if you exceed your best expectations.
  • And while many SSO platforms claim that you can easily entrust provisioning to another platform that they can connect to, that’s going to cost you more money to develop, to implement and to support. So you will want a platform that is capable of integrating all of your essential identity management tasks from the start.
  • There is a lot of other technical stuff that you are going to want, like compatibility with all the major standards (SAML, WS-Fed, OAuth), password vaulting and reverse proxy for those legacy apps that can’t make a standard federated connection, but that still need to talk to your federated environment (because throwing out everything you own to pave way for new standards isn’t always practical).

There is a solution that provides all of the above: EmpowerID. 

EmpowerID is an integrated and modular platform, built on a single codebase and driven by workflow with prebuilt one-to-many SSO and Identity Management scenarios with the needs of consumers in mind. 

EmpowerID’s visual workflow designer and adaptive HTML5 interfaces offer a vastly improved and simplified approach to traditional SSO and IAM challenges.  It can be stood up in just a few days or weeks depending on the customization desired, instead of the months that other applications take. 

Most importantly, EmpowerID supports a satisfying access experience for consumers and drives strong ROI with its secure, seamless and flexible identity processes.  

                                                   Request a Demo

Tags: WS-Fed, authentication, Identity Management, Federation, consumers, SAML, Single Sign-on, Password management, SSO, social media