The battle over bimodal IT is heating up. Now that there’s a reasonably broad consensus that Gartner’s advice about bimodal IT is deeply flawed – consensus everywhere except perhaps at Gartner – various ideas are springing up to fill the void.
The bimodal problem, of course, is well understood. ‘Traditional’ or ‘slow’ IT uses hidebound, laborious processes that would only get in the way of ‘fast’ or ‘agile’ digital efforts. The result: incoherent IT strategies and shadow IT struggles that lead to dispersed, redundant, and risky technology choices across the organization.
The battle, however, isn’t over the problem. It’s over what we should do about it. Perhaps we should add a third mode?

read more

(c)iStock.com/yipengge

There has been a consistent growth and increase in cloud application usage over the past five years as organisational IT leaders have realised the benefits of implementing them. This is also, in part, because of the fact that there is a major increase in remote employees, who need applications in the cloud to be able to work. Cloud applications have many obvious benefits to an organisation, such as improving efficiency, reducing costs and improving security.

Once these applications are implemented, though, organisational leaders often soon realise that managing accounts for cloud applications can be a headache. Just as with in-house applications, account admins need to be able to efficiently provision, change and disable accounts, as well as manage passwords and ensure the network is secure.

How is cloud account management different than managing in-house applications? Often these two different type of applications need to be handled differently since they have different requirements. What may work with an in-house application needs to be altered to work with a cloud application. So, what are some of the issues that organisations have with managing cloud applications, and how can they be resolved?

Manual actions

Manual account management in any type of application is time consuming. Admins must manually enter data and create accounts in each application for a new user, which can also lead to errors. For cloud applications, providers often try to mitigate this issue by offering a web-browser that managers can use to control access to the cloud application directly. However, provisioning is rarely automatic, which necessitates a sequence of manual operations. This means that the admin still must manually create each account and access rights for a new user.

While it is a headache for the account admin, it is equally as frustrating for the end user. For example, think of a remote employee, who needs accounts created for them. The process of doing so often takes several days to manually create all appropriate accounts, or to add additional access rights. Without the proper accounts or access rights the employee simply cannot begin work, and remains unproductive.

Security

When an organisation begins to use several different cloud applications it becomes difficult to ensure that the correct people have the proper access to them. Users may have access to systems and applications that they should not, leaving the company’s data unsecured. Over time, employees are often granted access for a project, for example, and the rights are never revoked.

Additionally, it needs to be guaranteed that cloud application access is disabled once an employee leaves the organisation. This step is often overlooked since a manager needs to manually disable the employee in each application that they have access to.

Naming and password conventions

Conventions governing naming standards and passwords are often inconsistent between network and cloud applications, making it an issue. In the network, a user ID might be based on the log-in name, and in the cloud it might be the e-mail address. This complicates exchanging user account details between the environments.

This is also an issue for passwords. When extremely complex passwords are required in the corporate network, cloud applications might not be able to handle this type of password. The possibility also exists that the cloud application requires a different duration for password expiration than within the corporate network.

Cloud management solutions

These are just some of the reasons why the organisation needs a solution that will work in house as well as with cloud applications seamlessly. As the identity and access management (IAM) industry grows, it is apparent how helpful these solutions can be for organisations that use cloud applications. They allow managers or account admins to easily manage cloud applications for employees throughout the organisation.

IAM solutions that allow for automated account management can drastically reduce the need for manual actions. Many solutions that work with in-house applications also can be set up to work seamlessly with cloud applications. This allows an HR employee or manager who is creating accounts for a new employee to easily check off which accounts need to be created for both in-house and cloud applications and the accounts will automatically be provisioned in near real time. This process allows for accounts to be created quickly and easily, so that end users don’t need to wait around for the access that they need. This also allows a manager to easily disable the accounts of an employee who has left the organisation, which ensures security of the network and data. Admins simply disable the user account in the solution and all connected accounts are automatically disabled.

To handle additional security issues, IAM solutions allow for many different resolutions. A manager can first easily generate a report that shows exactly who has access to what, as well as any changes that they are making in that system. Many solutions also support workflow management. With workflow management and self-service, employees and managers themselves can request, check and approve facilities without any IT intervention. For example, an employee may request access to an application, a project or to view reports. The approval process is part of a structured workflow. The manager can authorise the request and it can be implemented immediately in the network, or they deny the request and the employee will not receive access. This not only dramatically improves efficiency, but it assists with security. When an employee is requesting additional access or a new account it is ensured that the correct people are providing the permission.

To handle the multiple different naming and password conventions, an automated solution can be helpful as well. IAM solutions can enforce a standard naming convention across all applications while allowing for uniqueness when more than one employee has the same name. Additionally, a single sign-on solution can mitigate the password complexity issues by using a single set of credentials to log in and automatically authenticate the user each time they log into the application. Further, an SSO application can also routinely reset the password in the background, or prompt the user to do so, when expiration occurs.

Conclusion

Though very beneficial, cloud applications can also present many account and password management issues for companies of every size. IAM solutions have evolved over the years and now allow organisations to seamlessly manage both in-house applications, as well as any cloud applications that the organisation may want to implement. This allows the organisation to get all the benefits of using cloud applications without having to deal with the many management and password headaches. 

(c)iStock.com/AnthiaCumming

Shared services across the public sector continue to grow. Councils in particular are choosing to partner with neighbours, to share capacity, costs, risk and best practice.

The experience of many public sector shared services projects, show the importance of IT in successful shared programmes. Meanwhile in the private sector, recent research by McKinsey into the role of IT in mergers and acquisitions shows that typically 50% of merger value is related to IT synergy.

This emphasises the importance of IT planning, a willingness (and ability) to harmonise, simplify and standardise IT in  a shared service programme. Failure of IT preparation will substantially increase risks and result in a failure to realise the full benefits.

For those moving to a shared services model, ‘cloud’ is likely to feature highly in their plans.  A cloud model for IT offers the ability to scale up and down, only pay for what you use and to provide a ‘neutral’ place shared systems. It can be a staging post before a permanent solution to IT sourcing is resolved.

Here are the five areas likely to feature strongly in every organisation’s thinking before they embark on such a journey:

Audit your current situation

A core planning principle is to minimise the risk of the unknown. A good starting point is to create a complete inventory of software licences, hardware assets and IT service contracts in each of the partner organisation. This should identify their technical dependencies and contractual terms. It can also help to prioritise future work to rationalise a shared IT software portfolio to support the new services, such as retire, renew, retender or replace software assets.

Standardise your practices

It is also a good practice to establish common principles and policies in IT operation, such as ISO standards, methods for testing, change management, performance management and reporting. This can include areas such as appropriate information sharing, data security, disaster recovery and PSN compliance. There is unlikely to be a good reason why these need to be divergent across different public services such as councils (although Police and Military will have some legitimate differences).

Work together

For the shared services programme itself, the IT elements should be run and commissioned jointly, with pooled and dedicated IT resources from each partner organisation. This will almost certainly force a review of IT roles, responsibilities and activities, to avoid the pressure to increase the size of the IT teams to support shared working. You need to plan what this will look like and how it will work in advance, and stick to it.

Map your business structure

Enterprise architecture (EA) has become more widely used as an approach to understanding the business ‘frame’ on which an organisation operates – a model that shows the connection between areas such as technology, information flows, business processes, operational structures and customer service functions.

Whilst not advocating an EA methodology for shared services, the concept does give some common discipline to identify what is ‘in scope’ for a shared service programme.

Maintain a disciplined approach

Discipline will be needed to contain the pressure for tailored and unique IT solutions, and also to resist service areas trying to ‘opt out’ of sharing. It also can help in defining the new IT requirements, and to establish a common technology architecture necessary to support shared working.

A final consideration for all councils is how to create a single IT strategy but which recognises ‘one size does not fit all’ and each partner will have different needs. Rigour, consistency and alignment in planning will be essential, ring-fencing the areas which genuinely need to remain apart. Without this there will be a tendency to divergence, rather than consolidating the things to be shared, and creating the common IT platform to support sharing.

Throughout the whole planning process, priority should be given to practical IT initiatives which deliver real savings and benefits quickly, and demonstrate a responsive IT service and an understanding of digital demands.

I recently caught up with a former co-worker who now runs an information security program for a well-known retailer. While discussing new advances in cloud security and technology, he mentioned that his company had met with a provider that presented him with a mind-numbing number of deployment options for their solution. Some of the options rattled off included forward and reverse proxies; public, private, hybrid, and cloud versions of their product; an on-premise version; and packaging in an appliance or a box that could be racked in a data center.

read more