Power is nothing without control

As Italian tyre giant Pirelli's advertising reminds us, "Power is nothing without control." But managing identity, roles and access control is often worthless or at least can be a nightmare without the right tools and handling ability.

Last Monday (yes January the 2nd, during Christmas holidays which, in Italy, officially end on January 6th), one of our largest customers decided to activate a complex internal shake-up.
The reorganization consisted of selling-off one of their companies and merging several internal divisions to form new companies. To summarize, 700 new Business Units (out of 20000) were created, and more than 8500 users (out of 85000), mainly employees, were reassigned with modified business responsibilities and access rights.

Of course the IAM system is directly linked to the company HR system, and role management is integrally aligned with identity management. The solution is quite HR-oriented, incorporating business structure and responsibilities. The viable Role management solution addresses resource/responsibilities association and SoD, and is supported by 3 rule engine environments which implement administrative and security policies.
Since HR is directly connected to the IAM systems, each modification in the HR system usually activates an update in the Role management internal repository. The Resource-Provisioning functions then start synchronizing with the relevant target systems (SAP R/3, AD, etc).

Do they like the automatism advantage of such an IM implementation?
The answer is yes and no. In general, if the operation exceeds a certain complexity threshold, the customer wants full control over all the complete chain of input and output events. As this was the case, they wanted to verify, ahead of time, the impact of this complex reorganization.

Specifically, HR modifications instantly affected the model within the Role/IM infrastructure, but the customer deactivated resource provisioning. They wanted more time to evaluate the final reorganization results. Analyzing the new organization model within the IM repository was sufficient enough to evaluate these effects.

Since they were quite concerned about the number of users to be removed across the several targets, they blocked the massive HR-driven operations and then printed a specific report listing users to be removed along with the action type and justification (reason) codes.

This helped them determine whether or not the HR input was correct and if the policies implemented had any bugs. As it turned out, they discovered that a policy rule was, in fact, not well written.

Even though this all happened during Christmas holidays, they used the tools available inside the Role management infrastructure without any intervention from the System integrator.

Of course, while the HR operations were blocked during the analysis, all modification on roles and business responsibilities arriving from the authorization workflow carried on as normal, including the activation of modifications on the targets via Resource Provisioning modules.

Again, as Pirelli’s mantra goes: power is nothing without control…