The Dirty Secret of Identity Management - Part 2

Yesterday, I wrote about an alternative implementation strategy for identity management projects that maximizes the likelihood of success by emphasizing access governance rather than provisioning. Today, I'd like to explore this concept in greater detail.

Consider the classic approach to a provisioning-centric identity management project. A first phase may involve standing up the foundational infrastructure and seeding users from an authoritative source such as an HR system. A second phase performs automated provisioning of these users into Active Directory. A third phase extends this same functionality to an enterprise directory, and so on, and so on.

This approach encourages the notion of vertical identity management silos, each of which has to be conquered independently of the others, as illustrated here.

Figure 1: Classic Provisioning Approach

Within each of these silos, several things need to happen before automated provisioning becomes possible. Prerequisites typically include account discovery and correlation, data analysis and cleansing, and business process architecture. Accordingly, it can take a large enterprise several months to implement user provisioning for even a single resource. When an organization has potentially hundreds of systems that need to be managed, it becomes obvious why the failure rate for provisioning projects is so high.

Intuitively, one might think that after user provisioning has been implemented for the first resource, subsequent phases should become easier. After all, by this point the internal team is more comfortable with the technology and has gained valuable experience. Unfortunately, the opposite tends to happen. The problem with the siloed approach is that it precludes a holistic view of identity. It is therefore common for IAM architects to make false assumptions in early phases about how identity data will be persisted throughout the organization, only to have those assumptions shattered later on when attempting to manage a resource that has unusual (and previously undocumented) requirements. This inevitably requires rework and regression testing of processes that have already been implemented. I have yet to see an identity project where this didn't happen.

In summary, the classic silo approach so common in user provisioning projects is a recipe for budget overruns, extended timelines, complex configurations, inconsistent business logic and worst of all, failure to extend identity management to all critical systems.

A Governance-Centric Approach


Given the relatively low ROI and the high failure rate for provisioning-centric IAM projects, it is clear that a different approach is necessary. This is not to say that automated provisioning is unnecessary or even undesirable, but it should be viewed as just one piece of the identity management puzzle.

A governance-centric implementation strategy takes a horizontal, and therefore a more holistic approach to identity management, as illustrated here:

Figure 2: Governance-Centric Identity Management

Compare this to the traditional approach illustrated in Figure 1, and it should all begin to make sense. Instead of aligning project phases to vertical identity silos, the governance-based approach introduces the various functions of an identity management solution in a horizontal manner.

Phase one is now focused on the seeding, discovery and correlation of accounts for all relevant systems. Obviously, there is still a requirement to stand up the base infrastructure and seed user identities from an authoritative source, but beyond that, the goal of phase one is to build an aggregate view of identity data, providing visibility into who has access to what. This is achieved by implementing read-only connectors that go out to each resource, discover accounts and correlate them to identities where possible. There is no end-user functionality, no provisioning and thus no risk to the integrity of existing processes or data.

With this approach, it should be possible in most cases to create an aggregate view of access privileges within days or weeks, depending on how many resources are being queried. The discovery and correlation process for each resource will immediately be able to identify any orphaned or rogue accounts, in addition to data inconsistencies. These can be flagged for remediation as part of the data clean-up exercise that is essential to the success of subsequent project phases.

Once the aggregate view has been created, it immediately becomes possible to centralize and automate access recertification requests and compliance reports, perform role mining and analytics, and even to start introducing detective policy enforcement at the enterprise level. By any standard, these are all significant benefits for a phase one release. Furthermore, a horizontal approach promotes a more holistic view of identity, which helps to prevent the proliferation of resource-specific policies, processes and configurations. From the beginning, policies are implemented globally.

By the end of phase one, connectors are live for all critical target resources and identity data has been validated and cleansed. It therefore becomes possible to approach subsequent phases with a much higher degree of confidence and certainty than it would with a "one resource at a time" approach.

Phase two involves layering repeatable, generic business processes on top of what has been built thus far. Such workflows will typically encapsulate identity lifecycle events (new hire, transfer, terminate, etc...) and access request/approval processes. Again, the goal here is to define processes that are generic and reusable enough that they can be implemented globally. Business process workflows should be specialized only by the metadata with which they are populated at runtime. For example, consider an access request/approval pattern. In any organization, there are normally no more than a tiny handful of "types" of approval pattern (i.e. Manager Only, Synchronous, Asyncronous, and so on...) While each resource may require the requester or approver to provide resource-specific data, even the forms used to collect that data can be dynamically created at runtime by passing arguments into a workflow.

Once business processes have been defined as workflows, end users, managers and designated approvers can begin to use the identity management system to initiate and approve access requests. On the back-end of each process, a ticket or email can be generated to the "provisioner", who simply has to grant the desired privilege. Keeping human provisioners engaged is a useful mechanism for heading off any operational issues that may result from the introduction of new business processes. Based on their feedback, processes can be further refined to satisfy business requirements without impacting the data on any resource.

By the end of phase two, we have seeded all our accounts, deployed connectors into all target systems, created a global reporting capability, defined a unified view of access privileges and introduced centralized/streamlined business processes. Again, the benefits from phase two are significant; for one thing, centralized business processes offer greater enhanced auditing capabilities, but just as important, it begins to establish identity management as part of the corporate culture.

Which brings us to phase three. Now that the data is clean and new business processes have been introduced, existing read-only connectors can simply be write-enabled in order to start provisioning. This should be done on a resource-by-resource basis. But without the overhead of reconciliation, correlation and data cleansing for each resource, that should be a relatively trivial exercise compared to the effort of deploying provisioning connectors using the classic project approach. If workflows have been designed correctly (naturally, this depends to some extent on the identity product being used), making the switch from manual to "last mile" user provisioning should involve little more than a configuration change.

So there you have it; a holistic, governance-based strategy for implementation of an Identity Management solution. As I noted in my previous comments on this topic, the governance-centric approach is not dependent on any particular brand of identity management tool, as all of the major commercial offerings have the ability to deploy read-only connectors, correlate and define loosely-coupled workflows. In fact, the only obstacle is the willingness of IAM practitioners to think differently.

The Dirty Secret of Identity Management

When engaging with a customer, I like to begin by asking them a simple question: What is the first thing you think of when you hear the term Identity Management? In nine out of ten cases, they will mention user provisioning. Yes, we all love the idea of automated user provisioning. Provisioning rocks. In fact, provisioning is arguably the most prominent driver for most identity management projects.

There is one small problem, and it is a problem that most IAM practitioners are often terrified to admit. Provisioning projects are rarely successful. By which I mean that they generally fail to deliver promised benefits. Based on my own experience and that of other IAM professionals with whom I've discussed this topic, it is extremely rare for an organization to implement automated provisioning for more than 20% of all systems, regardless of what identity management product they are using. This isn't because commercial identity suites are technically inadequate, or even because organizational bottlenecks prevent the introduction of automated provisioning processes. It is because ultimately, provisioning is only a relatively minor element of a comprehensive IAM strategy, and practitioners have a tendency to overstate its importance. I've seen numerous cases where IAM project leads have focused on universal provisioning like Captain Ahab pursuing a whale, and their refusal to acknowledge that identity management involves much more than the mere deployment of provisioning connectors and workflows can lead to catastrophic project failure.

In the abstract, the expected benefits of automated provisioning make perfect sense. Operational efficiencies, reduced labor costs and faster onboarding are all legitimate metrics for an identity management ROI. But as identity management has matured, it has become increasingly apparent that provisioning is perhaps not quite as important as many practitioners once thought, and there is a compelling case to be made that identity governance has emerged as a more critical factor in the success of IAM projects.

To demonstrate this, let's begin by decomposing the various phases of a typical identity provisioning lifecycle:

• Aggregation: Core identity data is seeded from an authoritative source such as an HR system or contractor database.
• Reconciliation/Correlation: Existing accounts on target systems are discovered and inspected, and identities are linked to accounts on target systems using correlation rules.
• Request: The user requests an entitlement on the target system. Alternatively, a request can be initiated by manual or birthright assignment of a role.
• Approval: A designated individual approves or rejects the request.
• Provision: The user is granted an entitlement on the target system.

When one considers identity lifecycle in these terms, it puts the importance of provisioning into stark perspective. Let's think about it another way. If we remove provisioning from the above lifecycle and just focused on the first four phases, would the ROI for identity management be significantly reduced? Think about how much easier it would be to deploy an identity management solution if provisioning were not a factor. I'll come back to this momentarily.

From a purely technical perspective, automated provisioning isn't terribly complex. Most commercial identity solutions ship with provisioning connectors for the vast majority of common enterprise systems and provide frameworks that enable the rapid development of connectors for custom applications. So why is automated provisioning so difficult to implement? The most common factor is poor data quality in target systems. This creates the risk of corrupting existing entitlements data when the provisioning system attempts to compensate for inconsistencies. Another reason is that system owners refuse to allow a provisioning system to touch their data. These two factors alone can create enormous bottlenecks for a provisioning-centric identity management project. Not to mention that some manual business processes, particularly in the Approval-Provision stage, can be extremely difficult to automate since they may require some discretionary judgment on the part of the provisioner. Such actions are not always possible to replace with automated logic, at least not in the short term.

It may sound like I'm contradicting my earlier statement that organizational bottlenecks are less significant than inadequate corporate governance in the failure of provisioning projects, but a robust governance framework—at the core of which is a holistic IAM strategy—is essential to avoid such bottlenecks from arising in the first place.

When considering the TCO of manual provisioning processes, labor costs tend to be relatively low, as there is usually minimal effort required of provisioners. Besides which, it is not uncommon to find that provisioners have developed their own automated techniques for assigning entitlements on the back end of the provisioning process. More significant labor costs are typically found in loss of productivity incurred by end users waiting for access requests to be approved, in addition to labor costs incurred by the need to perform manual access recertifications.

With all this in mind, let's return to my earlier question. If we take provisioning completely out of the mix, is there a significant impact on the ROI for identity management?

Consider the identity provisioning lifecycle I described earlier. If we raise it to a higher level of abstraction, we can describe it as follows:

1. Aggregation/Reconciliation/Correlation
2. Request/Approval
3. Provision

If you focus on delivering just the first component in the knowledge that there is absolutely no risk of corrupting existing entitlements data, then it becomes possible to build out a large number of connectors and produce a unified view of entitlements data across the enterprise within a very short timeframe. This also creates the opportunity to perform data cleansing, because the identity management system is aggregating and correlating accounts and flagging any inconsistencies.

In the meantime, you can begin to layer centralized request/approval workflows on top of your identity data, using generic, parameterized workflow templates. If designed properly, workflows can be configured to generate a ticket for the human provisioner once all requisite approvals have been completed. Once the entitlement has been provisioned, the provisioner is required to sign into the identity management system and certify the request as completed. This will be verified by the identity management system during the next periodic reconciliation. Delinquent requests, unmatched/orphaned accounts and unapproved entitlements are discovered and flagged for review as part of the reconciliation process.

Finally, once you have analyzed and cleansed your data and the organization has become comfortable with the notion of a centralized identity management platform, you can begin to selectively enable automated provisioning and take human provisioners out of the loop. It still may not be possible to do this for every system, but by this point, the benefits already delivered by the identity management project will have compensated for this. If the request/approval workflows have been designed correctly, then making the switch from manual to automated provisioning should merely involve a configuration change, regardless of what identity product is being used.

Adopting this approach allows you to achieve rapid benefits by providing a unified, enterprise view of who has access to what within a very short space of time, perhaps even within days or weeks. Once you have created this level of visibility into privileges across the enterprise, it is relatively trivial to centralize and automate access recertifications, enable advanced compliance reporting and even begin the process of role analytics.

To the best of my knowledge, SailPoint is currently the only IAM/IAG vendor to have embraced the methodology I just described. They refer to automation as "last mile provisioning", and the architecture of their flagship IdentityIQ product effectively promotes a loosely coupled relationship between provisioning connectors and the core identity governance engine. SailPoint has been enormously successful in proving the efficacy of this approach. Yet in theory, there is nothing to prevent any commercial identity management solution from being deployed in this manner, providing that connectors are configured in read-only mode.

The "last mile" methodology focuses on horizontal rather than vertical introduction of identity services to the enterprise. By reducing the emphasis on automated provisioning in favor of identity governance, it clearly maximizes the chances of a successful implementation without significant impact on ROI.

Why Semantics Matter

It is all too easy for IAM practitioners to fall into the trap of thinking about identity management in terms of products, connectors, workflows, accounts, entitlements and correlation rules. But to your average business stakeholder—you know, the folks who ultimately determine whether an IAM project will succeed or fail—such terms are meaningless.

Years ago, before I switched careers and became an I.T. professional, I worked for an investment bank. Even though my official job title was “portfolio officer”, I was what we technologists commonly refer to as a “business customer”, using systems that provided highly sophisticated trade execution and settlement functions. Even though I had a conceptual understanding of how these systems worked, I was too busy doing my real job to know or care that when I received an error after executing a spot FX transaction, it was because a pointer to an object in our transaction database had miscast as an unsigned integer. I just expected the problem to be fixed, pronto. And when it wasn’t, I assumed that was because our I.T. folks were overpaid layabouts whose job security depended on them being able to confuse normal people like me with acronyms and technical gibberish.

Of course, after more than a decade on the other side of the fence, I know better. Yet even though the line between I.T. and the business is far less distinct than it was in the early 1990s, the semantic disconnects are the same as they ever were. The only difference these days is that now I'm one of those overpaid layabouts I used to disdain. So whenever I’m in a conference room, listening to I.T. staff discuss the concepts of identity management with “business customers”, I’m often reminded of those days, and can determine from the expressions on the faces of the business folks exactly what they are thinking.

Identity management is a veritable minefield of semantic misunderstandings, and failure to address them at an early stage of an IAM project can be fatal. Not only because it can exacerbate tensions between I.T. and the business, but because it can cause critical requirements to be misinterpreted. To preempt such issues, I always recommend creation of a glossary as part of the “Define” phase of an IAM project. That suggestion often elicits rolled eyes (mostly from other technologists, who are dismayed at the prospect that not everybody is as familiar with technical concepts as they are). My rule of thumb is this. If my mother-in-law cannot grasp the conceptual design of a solution, then I have no right expecting a business customer to understand it either. Not that I run every design past my mother-in-law, of course, but I’m sure you get my meaning.

The failure to appreciate the importance of semantics when deploying an identity management solution doesn’t just apply to implementers. In many cases, it also extends to product vendors. The business doesn’t think of identity management in terms of “Create User”, “Delete User”, “Modify User”, “Enable User” and so on. They are more likely to think of it in terms of lifecycle events (i.e. “New Hire”, “Change in Job Function”, “Name Change”, “Staff Augmentation”, “Contractor-to-FTE”, “Leave of Absence” and “Termination”). Yet very few products ship with configurable workflows that directly address these basic use cases without extensive customization.

An even greater semantic disconnect applies to entitlements management. When not even I.T. professionals can agree on the true definition of an entitlement (never mind a role), how can we reasonably expect to find common ground with business stakeholders? To some people, a role is synonymous with an LDAP, AD or RACF group (this couldn’t be more incorrect, by the way, but that’s a topic for another post). To others, it means a specific capability within a system, a job function or the ability to access a file share (technically the same thing as an entitlement, which opens a whole different can of semantic worms). As for the difference between fine-grained and coarse-grained entitlements, prepare to be met with glazed eyes if you choose to go down that particular rabbit hole.

While an IAM practitioner may view users as abstract blocks of data to be managed, business stakeholders view them as individuals who have job functions that cannot always be clearly expressed in terms of neatly labeled entitlements and permissions. An IAM architect may understand the difference between a user and an account, but such distinctions are not always intuitive for those who haven’t spent their careers thinking about identity governance. I recall one meeting several years ago where a security architect described users as “subjects”, a term familiar to any of us who have worked with access management solutions. He used this word several times while describing his solution. Eventually, a business analyst bravely raised her hand and asked him what the heck he was talking about. That opened a can of worms, from which it became apparent that the entire context of his briefing had been lost on the non-technical folks in the room. All because of one misunderstood word.

The truth of the matter is that to business customers, identity management is simple. As well it should be if we all speak the same language. On the I.T. side of the house, we may be wrestling with architectural nuances and product constraints, but those are not the reasons why most identity projects are unsuccessful. Failure to engage and communicate effectively with business stakeholders is a far more common factor. Our mission as IAM practitioners is to abstract the business from technical complexity, and that isn't always possible if we aren't speaking the same language.

Of course, this is an important consideration for any enterprise I.T. project, but in a discipline such as IAM, which is so heavily dependent upon well-defined business processes, the importance of defining and obtaining sign-off on a common glossary cannot be overstated enough. This is just one of the many reasons why it is critical to engage an experienced business analyst for any identity management project.

And one last piece of advice to my fellow geeks. Please don’t look at your business customers with disdain when you use jargon that causes their eyes to glaze over. After all, you probably couldn’t do their jobs any more than they could do yours. Besides which, they probably think that you’re an overpaid layabout whose job security depends on your ability to confuse them with gibberish.

My mother-in-law would probably agree with them.