Solution Brief: Modernise Enterprise IT

Executive Summary

Many enterprises are saddled with an IT architecture that has evolved organically over time. The realities of competing priorities, limited staffing and budgets often mean that systems and strategies remain in place far longer than originally intended. This often results in a significant burden of cost and complexity, and can compromise a business’s agility.

Recognising this reality, many organisations have embraced modernisation initiatives. Approaches vary between an incremental “two speed” model and the more ambitious “greenfield” method. Under either approach, a modern cloud-based identity management strategy is a critical catalyst in speeding the transformation process and ensuring systems and processes work together seamlessly.

Such an identity strategy helps businesses increase agility by deploying a single identity architecture, and facilitating change through automating many IT lifecycles. Businesses that embrace this change are able to decrease costs, increase efficient and accelerate growth.

The Challenge: Aging IT

If there is any constant in modern business and IT, it’s change. Mergers, acquisitions, changing priorities, new applications, services and platforms create a huge amount of flux in IT infrastructure.

Compounding reality is the fact that IT organisations are constantly being asked to do more with less. To provide value from shareholders, IT organisations push for efficiency, which often means making tough prioritisation choices. When it comes time to choose between rolling out new business services and updating legacy technology, new services almost always win out.

But the long term impacts of these decisions add up over time. Maintenance creates a tax on IT. Updates and changes monopolise cycles, infrastructure to support legacy applications strains capital budgets, and staff training and retention becomes a critical priority.

 

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The cost of aging IT

 

Left unchecked these impacts become a massive burden

• 71% of the IT budget for US federal civilian agencies is spent on maintaining legacy systems

• 65% of enterprise IT spend is on “run the business” 

Two Approaches to Transformation

Recognising the need to pay down this technical debt, many organisations are embracing IT modernisation initiatives. Since no two businesses are the same, two distinct models for transformation are emerging, each with its own pros and cons:

1. The “two-speed” model focuses on improvements in specific areas of the IT architecture, while leaving some areas undisturbed

2. The “greenfield” model seeks to make broad, sweeping changes across the IT architecture

The two-speed model is often appealing to organisations that wish to minimise disruption and operational risks. It identifies a prioritised set of focused projects and changes, and can be useful where budget constraints might preclude larger efforts. To be successful, the two-speed model also assumes there are no issues with existing integrations and that current architectural complexity is manageable.

By contrast, the greenfield model seeks to make broad, sweeping change to maximise the return on investment of the modernisation initiative. It takes a longer term view on budget, recognising that sweeping change will take time, and that business benefits will accrue over the following years. At times, this model is chosen out of necessity, when an overly complex, “spaghetti” architecture is hindering business growth.

Identity Management is Key to IT Modernisation

Under either approach, one of the biggest roadblocks to transformation is identity. 74% of enterprise executives surveyed believe IAM is critical or very important to digital business initiatives.

 

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Importance of IAM in Relation to Digital Business Initiatives

 

The reasons become clear when you examine several examples of the role identify plays in modernisation projects:

• Migrating an enterprise application to the cloud. As seen in the massive adoption of Office 365, businesses are embracing cloud-based technology for agility and simplicity. But with the proliferation of services, integration with Active Directory can be complex, causing delays and frustration.

• Moving an HR Information System (HRIS) to the cloud. Cloud-based HRIS offers myriad advantages, and integration with IAM can drive efficiency by streamlining the onboarding, offboarding and change processes.

• Building a web or mobile app. Digital offering present a tremendous opportunity to provide value to customers, but if the user experience is poor, adoption suffers. Being able to support the latest identify protocols can be a critical usability differentiator.

• Opening developer access to business systems. Interoperability and integration is key to modern business, but can open access errors. A modern identity strategy can help businesses facilitate access while remaining secure.

An Identity Strategy to Support Either Transformation Mode

Identity and Access Management strategies should be flexible enough to support either transformation m