Avatier Newsletter Q1 2012

News

Have you upgraded to AIMS 9.0 yet? If not, you're missing out on faster performance, better security, and increased scalability.

Through extensive testing with a very large customer – to be announced soon – AIMS is now optimized for up to one million identities and nearly as many groups. In this highly secure, large environment, we were able to assure the concurrent logon of more than 50,000 users – with less than a five-second delay. That's near-instantaneous productivity for 50,000 users!

To-date, 25 percent of Avatier users have already upgraded to AIMS 9.0 and are experiencing its performance, security, and scalability benefits. What are you waiting for?

Just click here to upgrade to AIMS 9.0 now.

Viewpoint

Returning Identity and Access Management (IAM) to the User

Welcome to the second edition of the Avatier customer newsletter! In November, we were a major sponsor of the Gartner Identity Access and Management Summit in San Diego, California and had an opportunity to see, first-hand, a host of new IAM solutions focused on helping IT managers like you be more productive in your job.

Unfortunately, the reality is that all these solutions are a step behind: they are trying to solve yesterday's problem, not tomorrow's—or even today's. The market is littered with overlapping, IT-centric solutions that don't move at the speed of business and therefore hinder, rather than help, productivity.

What's needed is a radically different approach that puts control of password management, user provisioning and accountability in the hands of business users – reducing the number of human interactions required within the IAM process to a series of simple approvals, speeding time-to-value and productivity.

This is the essence of the Avatier approach: building a trusted fabric above enterprise and cloud applications, assets and more in the form of a shopping cart-driven IT request portal delivered as an internal application store. By breaking identity and access management into discrete tasks, users within lines of business can seamlessly and quickly request the new or updated access they need to get their job done –when they need it—while IT remains focused on increasing security effectiveness and efficiency. This front-end request tool creates what Avatier calls the Trusted Identity Fabric™ of IT services, which enables underlying business disciplines to use the best-in-class tools to support their individual needs, while still allowing centralized administration and control of key enterprise resources. This approach provides a foundation that can transparently bridge multiple applications, services, and networks. For more information about this revolutionary new concept, take a look at our white paper.

As an Avatier customer, you already know – and are experiencing – the benefits of our innovative approach. Let us extend those benefits across your entire enterprise.

Nelson Cicchitto
CEO, Avatier

Spotlight

Cabot Corporation gives employees instant access to critical resources with Avatier's "IT Store" approach.

How quickly users can request and gain access to critical business systems can mean the difference between a multi-million dollar new customer and a missed opportunity. At Cabot Corporation, Avatier's "IT Store" approach improves password access and terminations, as well as ensures regulatory compliance.

PROBLEM

In any large, multi-national company, requesting access to business systems – such as ERP, manufacturing, or salesforce automation – can be a cumbersome, lengthy process for employees, as well as a compliance issue for IT. For Cabot Corporation, a Boston, MA-based materials manufacturer operating in 21 countries around the world with nearly 4,500 employees and partners needing access to more than a dozen different mission-critical systems, the company's antiquated, manual password management process was impacting employee productivity and the corporate bottom-line.

"One service touched five different people before it got to me for ultimate approval. It could take several days between the time the user submitted the request to the time she was approved and granted access, which translated into lost revenue for the company," recalls David Olbrys, IT Project Manager at Cabot. "We knew we needed to find a better, more efficient way to deal with account passwords, access and terminations across the enterprise, while ensuring adherence to government regulations."

SOLUTION

After engaging industry analyst firm, Gartner, to assist him through the evaluation and selection process for an automated identity and access management solution, Olbrys narrowed down the list from 15 initial vendors to just two: Avatier and another leading vendor listed in Gartner's User Provisioning Magic Quadrant (UPMQ). "By the time we embarked on our final, 30-day side-by-side testing period, in the summer of 2009, we had a very detailed document of testing criteria. The companies had to show us how to terminate an employee, how to add an employee, how to synchronize passwords across Active Directory, Domino and JD Edwards, and how to provision Active Directory groups using their tools."

In the end, Avatier won the competitive evaluation easily, based on end-user usability and technical elegance. "While the other company built what we needed themselves and then handed us the product to test, Avatier actually put the product in our hands and had us build what we needed during the proof-of-concept," Olbrys recalls. "Because the Avatier solution was easy to use and didn't create a new hierarchy or process for us, it was easy for us to build the solution that met our specific requirements, which gave us a huge amount of confidence."

BENEFITS

The decision made to implement Avatier, Olbrys' first order of business was to solve what he calls the 'big bang complaint' in the organization: passwords. "We rolled out Password Station first, because the biggest problem we had in the organization was that, with multiple business systems and multiple passwords, the number of account lock-outs was unbelievable," says Olbrys. "With Avatier, we were able to link all the business systems together through connections and synchronize the account passwords, which was an amazing benefit for the corporation right away. As an issue for IT to handle, account lock-outs have pretty much disappeared; users just go to the website and handle the issue themselves."

Deploying Password Station first provided a huge benefit to Cabot: "Once all the accounts were linked, we had visibility into the organization and we understood the problems with our naming conventions, so we could fix these issues before rolling out Account Terminator and ID Enforcer across the globe," says Olbrys.

NEXT STEPS

As thrilled as Olbrys is about the time savings and efficiency improvement thanks to Password Station and Account Terminator, he is even more excited about the benefits of Identity Enforcer. "As a lean IT organization, we're always looking for clever ways to do things better," notes Olbrys. "Through the use of Identity Enforcer, we're building an IT store that essentially removes the hands of IT from the weeds of Active Directory and other business systems and turns control of system access to the users themselves, using the web-based Avatier interface."

"Not only will Identity Enforcer save at least one full business day from the access request process, it will also ensure that we remain in compliance," Olbrys continues. "With the workflow built into the Avatier solution, we can receive the request and record the approval, as well as automate the process of giving the person access to the group."

At the end of the day, Olbrys says that Avatier has made his job much easier. "As a guy who has to run operations as well as administration, Avatier has made a huge impact. I can't tell you how many technologies I have to learn and I didn't have to become a genius on this product to realize the benefits. Plus, Identity Enforcer puts every function an IT person needs in one place, which is huge time saver for my entire IT staff," concludes Olbrys.

Tech Tips

Know the status of your system connectors—instantly!

Did you know that you can configure your AIMS 9.0 system to proactively alert you anytime the connector to a system is down?

Is your AIMS system configured to reset passwords or create accounts across multiple platforms? If so, wouldn't it be nice to know if the connector to one of those systems was not available—and why?

In AIMS 9.0 you can monitor the status of system connectors and receive an automatic email alert when the connector is down for any reason. Here's how:

• Access the AIMS configuration screen.
• Click on the "Avatier Identity Management Suite" icon in the left-hand pane.
• Click on the "Connectors" option in the center pane.
• On the Connectors page, in the "Email Connection Monitoring" section, check the "Enable" checkbox, set the frequency of the connector status check, and enter a valid email address in the "Email Address" text box.
• Click "Save" at the top of the screen.

Now, when a system is unreachable by AIMS, an alert will be sent to the specified email address, so you'll always know if your system is functioning properly—or whether a connector needs to be reset.