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Overview
“Agility is the ability to adapt and respond to change… agile organizations view change as an opportunity, not threat.”
-Jim Highsmith, software engineer and author of ‘Adaptive Software Development’
The flexibility, control and responsiveness of IT operations determine how agile an organization is. IT agility is about optimizing the flow of creating value for the customer services with the available resources in zero interference. In the age of massive IT automation, organizations always face the challenge of managing thousands of end-users and their activities that ensure uninterrupted IT processes. Each and every whereabouts of the tasks and responsibilities demand intense and real-time monitoring so that IT agility is ensured. At the same time, if necessary demands and key approvals are made amid robust IT security, then the organization can be said to be ‘agile’.
How can IT Agility take a hit?
In the era of digitalization, organizations prioritize IT security policies and ensure how strictly they are followed by the end-users. The seriousness of the situation intensified during the pandemic and even in the post-pandemic time. In the last couple of years, many organizations suffered unusual, unexpected and IT operational setbacks, and thus, IT agility got a hit. With most of the critical accesses happening remotely, timely permissions and necessary denials play a crucial role to ensure security and flexibility among the organizations’ workforce.
Today hybrid work models are adopted by global organizations to stay afloat with the demanding trends. The flexibility of the entire workforce who prioritize, control and monitor the elevated and privileged activities builds up the foundation of IT agility. Excessive delay in the IT administrative tasks affects organizations in terms of smooth IT processes even if the IT security infrastructure is robust enough. It could even affect the service quality followed by slow access and unwanted delay in services.
To be precise, IT efficiency is directly proportional to IT security in any vast IT ecosystem. And if organizations are efficient enough to manage every day-to-day task with zero intervention, then we can say that the organization is agile enough to withstand cyber threats.
What about IT agility in Privileged environment?
In case of the privileged environment in an organization, IT agility ensures that all the privileged activities are happening smoothly with no hindrance. As privileged identities are the gateways to confidential business information, any organization would definitely ensure end-to-end security for all privileged activities. However, at the same time, what about the efficiency of the IT processes? Can we consider an organization agile if the approvals for elevated rights take a long time, privileged sessions are delayed due to too many privileged users, or even managing requests from one desk to the other manually?
Let’s see how ARCON’s Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution ensures IT agility of an organization.
Role of ARCON | Privileged Access Management (PAM)
ARCON | Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution, in this backdrop, not just ensures secured access in the enterprise network, but also helps IT administrators to accomplish their tasks efficiently and on time. The flexibility of the overall business process and reliability of the stakeholders determine the extent of IT agility the organization is having. Here are some robust features of PAM solution that can help organizations to maintain agility simultaneously with protecting confidential business data assets.
Single Sign-On: In a vast IT environment, where there are multiple system administrators, maintaining efficiency is a real challenge because multiple system admins mean multiple user IDs, multiple access credentials and multiple approval procedures. Single Sign-On helps admins to overcome the challenge of managing multiple accounts by automating the access rights without the necessity to remember multiple user IDs and passwords.
User OnBoarding: It is always necessary for the IT administrators to ensure ease of offering permissions while adding new user accounts and servers groups with associated privileges. It helps administrators to provision or deprovision users by interacting with the active directory. With PAM, organizations can ensure all information on boarded stays confidential and secure.
Auto-Discovery: Identifying and tracking ownership of privileges is a real challenge for the IT Security team. With this, the IT risk management team records the details of all shared accounts and service accounts and thereby mitigates the risk of unrecorded access.
One Admin Control: In a vast IT environment, every access to the critical systems needs to happen through one admin console. All these rule and role-based access in the IT environment happens only on a ‘need-to-know’ and ‘need-to-do’ basis.
Workflow Management: Enterprise IT agility is ensured if the administration job is prompt and hasslefree. This PAM feature automates the approval process of privileged users, user groups and service groups. In case of manual approvals, it remains time-consuming and tedious, hence Workflow Management enhances efficiency.
AD Bridging: Different operating systems in a single network periphery could be highly challenging for the IT administrators. ARCON’s PAM solution allows organizations to use Microsoft Active Directory as the authoritative source of identity. It accepts both privileged and non-privileged accounts from non-Windows machines (eg. Linux, Unix).
Desk Insight: Attending requests from one desk to another is a real challenge for IT administrators in a vast IT environment. In order to make it efficient, this feature helps them to manage requests from one desk to another by troubleshooting a machine without moving. It even helps to allow admin rights, define a set of tasks, manage passwords etc.
Robotic Process Automation: Who likes to do regular mundane IT tasks? The Robotic Process Automation (RPA) automates these tasks with ease, efficiency and accuracy. It also offers to customize steps for the end-users for any SSO activity.
Conclusion
Once organizations ensure both the security and efficiency in the IT environment, IT agility is restored with zero intervention. It maintains flexibility and offers a different edge to the responsiveness of the organization. Above all, it helps to meet the requirements of the compliance standards and thereby maintains business continuity.
