The recent announcement of the expanded Microsoft Entra product family is exciting news for Condatis. In light of these recent changes, we are expanding our range of digital identity solutions to support our customers at every stage in their identity journey. Over the coming weeks, our team will provide an update on each of the 8 Entra products, detailing how your organisation can maximise the benefits of these new technologies.
To get things started, our Chief Product Officer, Alasdair Murray, shares his top 5 digital identity project learnings and where we can help.
1. Focus on business outcomes rather than technologies.
Business leaders often struggle to define the benefits of identity technologies. It’s tempting to rely on security and risk mitigation benefits as the key investment drivers. However, digital identity can significantly influence business evolution beyond these areas. Focus on developing measurable for the complete organisation.
For example, reducing staff onboarding from weeks to minutes, building platforms that drive the commercialisation of digital services, reducing support costs through self-serve accounts, and reimagining user journeys to promote brand loyalty and repeat custom.
Our Solution and Business Architects love uncovering clear business outcomes, developing flexible digital strategies, and delivering measurable change for businesses. I advise starting with the business requirements, designing the architecture, and then selecting technologies using your needs as guiding principles.
2. It’s about evolution, not revolution.
Focus on driving digital change through evolution, not revolution. No one knows what tomorrow’s digital business will need, so wherever possible, use industry best practices, standards, and existing systems to build practical ecosystems that can evolve with your business.
In our experience, this will likely require a range of technologies, take time to develop, and be integrated with existing specialised systems and data sources rather than necessitating a complete replacement of your current solution.
Defining your strategies and deploying the right Microsoft technologies is all about your ultimate goals. For example:
- Entra Verified ID is a more suitable route for you if you want to unlock data exchange across your organisation and system boundaries.
- If you want to protect, monitor and audit access to your critical assets, then look to Entra ID Governance.
- Entra Permissions Management is for you if you want to support your multi-cloud infrastructure to work with and evolve your existing ecosystem.
3. Do more with less.
Maximise your Microsoft licenses before considering other Identity and Access Management vendors. Technology insight companies such as Gartner regard Microsoft Entra products as market leading1. You likely already have access to best-in-class products through your existing E3 and E5 licenses. A recent Forrester report, The Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Entra from March 2023 2, highlighted the benefits Entra ID, External ID, and Verified ID could bring to your business.
The report describes a 50% increase in IAM team efficiency, a 20% reduced likelihood of security breaches, a 90% reduction in time to access cloud resources, and a 75% reduction in password resets due to self-serve.
4. Stand on the shoulders of giants.
Security and identity are a journey that will evolve and consist of various solutions incorporating cloud infrastructure, service wrappers, middleware, and applications from different vendors to solve your business requirements. In our experience, there is no ‘golden solution’, so selecting the right vendors and partners to be with you on the journey is essential.
Some of our clients have been on their journey with us for over 10 years, as we specialise in digital identity. We live and breathe flexible, reliable, scalable, and secure solutions using industry-leading technologies with Microsoft Entra and Azure at their core. In 2022, we were honoured to be recognised by Microsoft as a leading Identity and Access Management partner and their Global Partner of Excellence for Entra Verified ID.
5. Get ready for accelerated business change.
Finally, without exception, we see in our engagements that once organisations start the journey to a unified digital identity strategy, the levels of positive business impact accelerate quickly. We regularly help organisations solve short-term needs by making digital services securely available or optimising remote user onboarding and provisioning. However, other benefits quickly become apparent once those are met and the strategy evolves.
For example, working in the nuclear utilities sector, we quickly established the principles of digital identity and then demonstrated the business benefits of utilising Entra Verified ID. For our customer, Sellafield Ltd, 1 in 5 process steps required manual immutable traceability that could be digitised, 25% of current workflows had high potential for automation, 55% of process steps would benefit from digital identity solutions, and there could be a 90% reduction in data breach risks3.
References
1 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Access Management, November 2022.
3 Sellafield DLT Filed Lab, Digital Catapult and Sellafield Ltd., July 2022.
If you’d like to be updated about the Microsoft Entra product family and how Condatis is helping organisations evolve, sign up for our newsletter or speak to our team to discuss your business goals.
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