Identity Management and the SMB: Using Scale Out IDM to Start Now
Many small medium businesses have ignored the benefits of identity management, even though they know it can be at their own peril. I wrote an article years ago on why IDM is a must outlining the need for automating your identity management and credential management system, yet, they do without. I don’t blame them. There have really not been any good affordable ways in previous years to implement IDM for the SMB.
I feel your pain. I’ve had an issue with this for years, and internally at my company I kept fighting the good fight. “Why can’t we offer an affordable IDM system to the Small Medium business community that provides the fundamental IDM features I’ve been “soap boxing” for so many years!!
Most major vendors typically don’t scale down complex solutions until the blood has been sucked out of the Fortune 500, and they need to find new market share. Novell did offer a hobbled version of IDM called the bundled edition that shipped with Novell OES2, and recently they released Novell Identity Manager 4 Standard edition, so we can be thankful for that. But do they answer all the questions? Do they scale out using SOA? They can if they add GreyTower Identity Integration on the side.
This scenario actually works with any IDM package that can connect to LDAP or any number of compatible integration APIs, but let’s take Novell Identity Manager 4 Standard Edition for example. This package provides rules based user provisioning (my basic requirement # 1, Identity synchronization, my basic # 2 requirement, and password management and self-service, my # 3.
Overall I don’t really have anything bad to say, just that they don’t follow scale out IDM on their own. This is not a knock on Novell, they were early to the game, so they had to continue down the path they blazed.
GreyTower Identity Integration was built to provide SOA an scale out IDM strategies, so you can implement a package like Novell Identity Manager 4 Standard edition, along with GreyTower Identity Integration Server and you have a platform for Scale Out IDM, and the means to connect to a pure play SOA platform like MuleSoft.
So with this in mind, small medium businesses can implement their scaled down IDM package knowing that with GreyTower, you can with relevant ease scale that implementation out in an “as needed” way.
There is another strategy to start even smaller. GreyTower Identity Integration Suite can on its own provide basic Identity services that can be deployed in a point appliance strategy.
With these options available, there is no more excuses for not having Identity Management in place.
Author, Marc Potter
Follow me on Twitter @mrpotter1
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