Empowered people make pragmatic decisions to improve the productivity of themself and their team. This can often lead to the dreaded “shadow IT’, and, more specifically, “Identity Sprawl” with each system having unique login credentials, impacting security, scaling poorly, increasing end-user complexity.
The problem? Each system, introduced to fix a targetted problem, often has a new, unique, login for each new user. We call this ‘Identity Sprawl’. When the team is 3 people, this can be ok. But as the team scales, the inevitable problems arise:
- users recycle the password
- users do not get removed when they leave the team or organisation
- password reset flow becomes a challenge (who do I talk with)
- security audits fail
Solutions to Identity Sprawl exist, but are often championed by a different team, or too complex a process to obtain permission to use. OpenID Connect, SAML provide strong simple identity. Identity providers such as Azure, Google, Okta exist to harmonise the user side. However, often we are left with systems which don’t have a centralised authorisation layer (the other half of identity). Introducing the Agilicus Identity Aware Web Application Firewall can solve this in a single, central point in the network.
Let the new applications emerge, without fear of password breach, without complex retooling and rewriting to move the authorisation into them.