2019 SailPoint Identity Insider Magazine - Magazine - Page 4
LAWRENCE WOLF
Managing Partner,
Edgile
What Does Cloud-First and Identity
Security Really Mean to Business?
As organizations adopt new
technologies and evolve their
business protocols through
Digital Transformation, what’s
the effect on identity and access
management (IAM)?
In the past, IAM was focused on internal human
identities and on-premises applications. Today,
it’s also about external identities, including
contractors, business partners, clients and Internet
of Things (IoT) devices. Additional complexities
come into play as the digital infrastructures
change from exclusively on-premises to a hybrid
on-premises/cloud environment serving a highly
mobile, often global, workforce. Clearly, digital
transformation requires a strategic plan.
As you move to the cloud, here are five questions
to consider:
1. Do you have a hybrid strategy?
2. Have you evaluated your risk posture?
3. Do you understand your compliance,
organizational and process implications?
4. Do you have a technology deployment and
consolidation strategy?
5. Do you have an ongoing governance and
management plan?
Your hybrid strategic plan must be comprehensive
and well-documented. The organization needs
to plan this change with an understanding of an
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SAILPOINT IDENTIT Y INSIDER
overall risk model and the importance of having
a sustainable multi-year focus to transform the
enterprise. But understanding all the implications
of your cloud environment is only half of this
puzzle. Executives also need to understand
company needs. You’ll want to have a crossfunctional IAM team representing key technology
and business owners. With a complete roadmap,
these stakeholders will be able to create and
adopt changes working from the same businessaligned strategic plan.
It’s all going to get more complicated in the next
few years. Gartner is projecting that by 2020, half
of all large enterprises will require an approved
exception to put new workloads in-house. By 2023,
Gartner anticipates that half of all app interactions
will entirely function only with visual and other
sensory elements, disrupting conventional
concepts of data protection and firewalls.
According to Gartner, companies are going to
become far more dependent on their cloud
vendors’ offerings. By 2021, 80% of Amazon Web
Services and Azure customers will purchase addon security controls from their cloud vendor, which
is quadruple the number from 2018.
The ideal hybrid environment is not solely about
being more cost-effective and more secure than
on-premises. It’s about having an IAM strategy
that is precisely tuned for your company, based
both on where it is today and where it plans to be
tomorrow.