Inevitably, organizations get to a point where it becomes challenging to impose increased security measures on their end users because the advancements would have too large an impact on their daily convenience and usability. Orchestration capabilities for identity and access management (IAM) products have allowed security teams to enhance their security measures. It’s a service that allows administrators to design the exact user experience utilizing a low/no code UI where the admin can drag and drop their design, test, and deploy without needing to be a developer. When referring to orchestration, I’m speaking to orchestration as a tool that extends your IAM products. Think of “identity orchestration” as a process that defines how and when to execute a task or create advanced logic through a workflow-based decision tree. If you need to define such a process, then orchestration is likely the tool you’re searching for. There are many ancillary benefits like improved change management processes, A/B testing, and no waiting for new features. Organizations use orchestration primarily to implement necessary security measures while still providing desired experiences.
Typically, in the IAM space, orchestration is usually utilized to:
- Extend the current authentication product’s security and registration policies to create custom ones – like adding new steps such as accepting terms and conditions upon the next login or defining the exact logic for which factors are required in an MFA flow or for the signup registration process, define custom input fields such as “enter your employee ID or last four of social.
- More traditional orchestration cases enable admins to integrate third-party software with their existing tech stack or to purchase a new critical point solution. For instance, if your use case involved going through a third-party identity verification or liveliness test as part of your initial user registration and signup process, orchestration can seamlessly integrate it into flow without requiring the IAM product to officially support the third-party product.
Can orchestration help our Zero-Trust initiatives?
To implement a ZeroTrust architecture, automation is essential, and orchestration plays a critical role in achieving it. Orchestration is key in centralizing data from third-party products into a single location, such as your SIEM tool, or standardizing data before it is stored in your Identity provider (IdP) solution. But it also means incorporating workflows for those exceptions that you’ve made over the years. If you have different rules for on-prem apps, third-party contractors, privileged users or apps, and maybe you have had to use different systems like policies at the networking tier with a Zscaler or rules on your proxy server, orchestration can play a critical role. Wherever you enforce policies in these use cases, you can use orchestration to create consistent policy enforcement across all the different places these tools, these apps, or these users live.
Now what?
We’ve heard for a while now that identity is the new perimeter. Organizations must start with identity to make ZeroTrust work, so that means your IdP should be the vendor that provides you with orchestration capabilities. The IdP is the center of the universe here and it needs to be able to get data from where it needs it, integrate in real-time, and ultimately be flexible enough to implement the user experience and level of security your business requires. Check with your Identity Provider vendor if they have orchestration as an offering.
SecureAuth built orchestration capabilities natively into our products so it can provide the ultimate amount of flexibility. Please ask us for a demo today.
