1 Introduction
Organisations can face challenges in identity management without a unified identity platform. The lack of centralised monitoring on who has accessed what, who has given access and for how long, makes it tough to balance security and productivity. Having a siloed approach can result in organizations lacking a holistic view into who has access to enterprise resources not only for their employees but also non-employees and machines.
In the absence of a robust platform, organizations often lack the capacity and AI tools to handle the rapid onboarding of applications. Consequently, these organizations tend to limit their application onboarding to only the most commonly used applications. This results in a significant lack of governance over access and substantial security vulnerabilities. These organizations lack a centralized identity data model, which hinders their ability to make informed access decisions based on comprehensive data. They also lack the ability to set up event triggers or leverage APIs to connect to other third-party systems and collect additional data that is crucial to making identity-related decisions. Furthermore, they are unable to feed this data into AI tools to draw insights and contextual risk information, which is crucial for making informed decisions. Another challenge is these organizations lack the capacity to implement interactive workflows for manual, repetitive tasks, which places an undue burden on their identity teams and results in lost time and money for their organizations. These organizations have failed to seize opportunities to foster collaboration and boost productivity through the use of thousands of automated executions.
To address these challenges, the adoption of a unified identity security platform is becoming increasingly prevalent. This approach supports centralized identity management, enhances security, and improves the user experience. Moreover, it allows organizations to implement consistent security policies, streamline compliance, and reduce IT workload by automating routine identity-related tasks, thereby enhancing operational efficiency and safeguarding sensitive data.
A unified identity platform provides a single interface for managing all identity-related tasks, which streamlines administration and reduces the learning curve for IT staff. Furthermore, it guarantees that identity policies and controls are consistently applied across all systems and applications, thereby reducing the risk of discrepancies and security gaps. Additionally, users enjoy an enhanced experience with a unified set of credentials for access, eliminating the need for multiple logins and boosting productivity. A key benefit of unified identity platforms is having core self-service capabilities, which empower users to manage their own access requests, password resets, and profile updates.
A unified approach also strengthens the organization's overall security posture. A unified platform provides centralized monitoring and auditing of identity-related activities, enabling more efficient detection and response to security incidents. It can facilitate consistent enforcement of policies across all applications and systems within an organization's IT infrastructure, which can contribute to minimizing vulnerabilities and maintaining compliance. Moreover, unified identity platforms provide comprehensive reporting tools that facilitate compliance with regulatory requirements by offering centralized visibility into usage, access history, and detailed identity information. This can streamline the audit process, facilitating the demonstration of compliance and the management of audit requirements.
From a business standpoint, unified identity platforms enhance efficiency while reducing expenditure. By combining identity management services such as provisioning, certification, workflows, and others, organizations can eliminate the need for multiple systems, leading to cost savings. Furthermore, unified identity platforms streamline identity operations, making it easier to manage identities and access rights, which can lead to operational efficiencies. These platforms are designed to accommodate the growth of the organization. As business needs change, a unified platform can more readily adapt to new requirements and integrate with new applications and services.
This KuppingerCole Executive View report focuses on SailPoint Atlas, an identity security cloud platform that unifies information from different resources through its connectivity framework to manage and secure real-time access to critical data and applications for every enterprise identity.
