Cloud-based IAM boosts BYOD

The proliferation of user-owned tablet PCs, netbooks, notebooks, smartphones and other devices in the workplace - encouraged by the technology race between the Apple and Android camps - has thrown up a number of challenges.

For companies 'buying into' the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) movement in the hope of reducing IT equipment acquisition costs, one of the key challenges is keeping pace with the 'usability' of these devices while maintaining security within the corporate environment.

Another is achieving traditional management objectives as laid down by longstanding company policies, while using new-generation devices capable of effectively rewriting the rules.

These organisations have fallen into the trap of being left behind from a technological standpoint - unable to share in the productivity and mobility benefits that BYOD programmes would have brought to their workers.

Even organisations that accepted BYOD programmes but outlawed popular services such as Dropbox, for fear that their sensitive information would end up in personal accounts, and forbade the use of public Web mail services (for the same reason), or barred the use of smartphones as mobile WiFi hotspots, are now forced to come to terms with the fact that their efforts were in vain.

Their dictates were almost always circumvented by inventive, tech-savvy employees.

Should these companies have managed to strip BYOD devices of many of the attributes that attracted employees to them in the first place, the result would be a significant drop in corporate and personal efficiencies. There would be no winners.

These scenarios have underlined the need for increased 'functionality' in the workplace to meet the demands of the BYOD phenomenon.

Fortunately, the era of the 'cloud' has given organisations an opportunity to positively re-engage with their BYOD users. And it has given network administrators an opportunity to regain control of identity management, application delivery and data security.

Their dictates were almost always circumvented by inventive, tech-savvy employees.

Martin May is regional director at Enterasys Networks.

Against the backdrop of the burgeoning adoption of cloud applications and services, many organisations have introduced identity and access management (IAM) as a service - better known as cloud-based IAM - as a solution.

IAM platforms enable the detection of new devices along with their identity, and enable a registration process for them. And they can facilitate authentication required to properly identify users - employees or guests - and dynamically grant them access to appropriate IT infrastructures.

They are also able to deliver new-generation applications to BYOD users through a secure portal, while offering administrators ways to control how, when and where employees are able to access corporate resources.

It has been said that cloud-based IAM could well account for around 20% of all new IAM system sales this year, up from less than 5% in 2011.

Undoubtedly, organisations that have already placed legacy applications in the cloud are more open to the concept of having an IAM infrastructure in the cloud.

They are already benefiting in areas of efficiency, effectiveness and enablement, while profiting from the levels of integration between their cloud-based infrastructures and their software as a service environments.

For network administrators keen to move up to cloud-based IAM, it is important that they have a good handle on what they are trying to manage - how many identities, for example - so they can take advantage of economies of scale to lower costs and boost operational improvements.

Importantly, administrators should commit 100% to the cloud and underpin this commitment with a comprehensive, detailed roadmap for the business going forward, with a clear emphasis on BYOD strategies.