1 The Challenge

Protecting digital assets, the systems, and applications in an IT environment of growing complexity and of a hybrid nature while facing ever-increasing attacks involves several actions organizations must take. Protecting against internal and external attackers requires a well-thought-out understanding of risks and countermeasures. Among the core elements of every infrastructure, we find IAM. IAM done right ensures that identities, their user accounts and passwords, and their access entitlements are well-managed. IAM thus reduces the attack surface by helping organizations move towards the “least privilege” principle. IAM provides the tools to automate processes around managing user accounts and access entitlements, and also for regularly reviewing these and identifying excessive entitlements.

The most common types of challenges that organizations have to contend with are:

1.1 Legacy applications

Most organizations operate in a hybrid environment with a combination of legacy systems and applications that coexist with cloud services. Enabling easy, consistent access to applications is business-critical, no matter whether those applications are hosted on legacy infrastructure or modern cloud infrastructure.