A Clear Business Case for Compliant Provisioning

I have spent a fair amount of time recently, ruminating on compliant provisioning and what comes after it. It is a fascinating mental exercise and if it remained as such, it would be useless. Yesterday, I got to see it in action.

I was at a customer, watching our integration with their provisioning system get installed and configured. It was, as all good software installs should be, quite boring. But what did captivate me was the business case and drivers for compliant provisioning. Though our customer has a mature provisioning system in production, they have yet to achieve fully automated provisioning. Why? Certainly not for lack of trying. Because their SAP environment is large, complex, and ever-changing, they cannot implement a comprehensive set of automated provisioning rules for fear of SoD creeping in.

They already rely of Approva BizRights to do “What If” analysis. It verifies on an ongoing basis that role definitions do not generate separation of duty problem as well as make sure accounts don’t contain any SoD problems as well. Currently, their outsourced help desk fields access requests. They gather up the roles being requests and use BizRights to perform What If analysis on the proposed account changes and then route the request on for provisioning.

Instead of an access request flowing to the help desk then into BizRights for analysis, they plan on automating the access request via their provisioning system. By using our “What If” analysis within the provisioning system they can cut out the help desk all together, eliminating that manual step. A handful of their SAP systems generate the vast majority of their ticket call volume. By implementing compliant provisioning, integrating BizRights with their provisioning tool, they are looking to cut that call volume down to 0 and save a bundle in the process.

A couple more of these kinds of deployments and compliant provisioning will be the norm in the provisioning market… and then I’ll be talking to you about what comes next.

You mean people actually use this stuff?

Matt Kelly at Compliance Week threw out a line recently:

Compliance Week is researching a story about compliance with identity management and user access policies. We’d like to hear about what policies you have in place for those needs, and what problems you’ve encountered (and solved) along the way. Send us your thoughts, and expect an article on the topic in upcoming weeks.

Needless to say, I am very curious what people will share on this subject. I’m always fascinated to hear how people apply user provisioning tools.

Back in the day there were two major selling points for user provisioning: compliance and reduced help desk call volume. Customers were quick(er) to recognize the reduced help desk call volume but the compliance aspect lagged, mostly dueto the fact that no one knew what compliance meant. (These were the pre-SOX days mind you.)

Times have certainly changed as has the messaging. Recently provisioning for compliance has morphed into compliant provisioning. User provisioning systems have matured to a point that organizations can use them as service platforms. Organizations are realizing that their provisioning infrastructures are great vehicles for other services: password management, role lifecycle management, and so on. Compliant provisioning is one of the best examples of this.

If our recent webinar with KPMG and IBM was any indication, then the market is desperate for compliant provisioning solutions. We had hundreds of attendees asking some very tough questions about implementation, architecture, and resources needed. I can’t wait to see if Matt’s research reaffirms what we are seeing in the ever maturing provisioning market.

Made the leap

After nearly 7 years of working from home, I have just started a new job… with an office. I have to say, I thought that the adjustment would be a lot harder than it has been. That being said, the commute has been very painless… I am sure I’ll change my tune when I end up sitting on the Beltway for an hour just to go two miles.

I am really excited about my new gig. Approva is a great company with awesome people. I actually look forward to the commute and that should tell you something about how much I am into this new job.