Category: Identity Governance

Identity Governance comprises of Identity Management and Governance.

Identity Management is the process of Automation of JML Activities while adhering to the organizational/geographical laws.

Identity Governance helps in “Verification of Excess of Stale Privileges”.

Sailpoint – Service Now Integration

Posted on by Sandilya Krovvidi in Identity Governance, Sailpoint

Ticketing systems form a great part of any enterprise’s IT infrastructure. Service Now is a global leader in cloud based ticketing systems and has been playing a visionary role in ITSM and ITOM.

Sailpoint integration with Service Now provides a great value when direct provisioning from Sailpoint is not possible.

It streamlines the manual provisioning by raising tickets on Service Now for provisioning. This provides a great visibility and accountability in the IT environments.

 

In the following presentation, we provide a detailed overview of Service Now integration with Sailpoint:

The following is a demo of various types of Service Now integrations that are supported by Sailpoint:

Sailpoint – Refresh Identity Cubes

Posted on by Sandilya Krovvidi in Identity Governance, Sailpoint

In Sailpoint’s Identity IQ “Refresh Identity Cubes” is one among the most important internal tasks. Refresh Identity Cubes helps in building 360 degree purview of an identity based on all the data aggregated from external sources.

The following video is an extensive discussion on various aspects of Refresh Identity Cubes.

The various aspects that are covered as part of this video are:

  1. Mechanisms to filter the identities to be considered for Refresh.
  2. Various options in the Refresh Identity Cubes.
  3. Using Multi-threading to improve the performance

 

 

 

 

Sailpoint Unix Integration

Posted on by Sandilya Krovvidi in Identity Governance, Sailpoint

Unix is the mother of all operating systems and also is the foundation for Tim Berner Lee’s invention.

Every enterprise has a huge Unix foot print spanning across thousands of servers running various legacy applications.

As part of the mammoth task of securing the IT environments, securing the Unix servers would be the first step.

At ENH iSecure, we thrive to achieve complete and impeccable solutions leaving nothing to chance.
As a part of these efforts, we are speaking about Identity Governance in Unix with the help of Sailpoint’s IIQ.

The following is a video where we speak about governance of Unix using Sailpoint’s IIQ.

The following is a demo on Unix integration with Sailpoint.

IdentityIQ parallel and serial approvals

Posted on by Mahesh Bitla in Identity Governance, Sailpoint, Technology

 Introduction

Out of the box Sailpoint’s IdentityIQ provides numerous workflows for provisioning, we can implement our custom workflows according to the necessity. Similarly, parallel and serial approvals are workflows used in an enterprise to manage the access of the user.

Requirement

In the world of IAM, one thing every developer should remember is that “Right thing must be accessed by the Right user at a Right time“, from the above sentence we can say that an access must be rightfully distributed to the user.

In this requirement a user in an enterprise requested an entitlement or role using IdentityIQ then that access must be approved by the work groups which are maintaining that privilege.

Understanding parallel and serial approvals in IdentityIQ

The following video illustrates about parallel and serial approvals.

Working demo of parallel and serial approvals

The following video demonstrates how parallel and serial approvals accomplishes.

 

 

 

PlainID – Product Overview

Posted on by Mahesh Bitla in Identity Governance, PlainID, Technology

PlainID is a young Authorization Management software company. They found an innovative approach to simplify and optimize dynamic, fine grained access to resources and data.

Following video demonstrates about the PlainID product Overview, Architecture and practical implementation of the product in the field of Identity & Access Management.

 

Solving problem SailPoint IdentityIQ “Mark Invalid Error”

Posted on by Mahesh Bitla in Identity Governance, implementation-problems, Sailpoint, Technology

Problem description 

When we try to correlate the accounts into SailPoint’s identityIQ using multiple authoritative sources the following
exception may arise.

Why this happens

The main reason for this error is ambiguity of accounts. After the account aggregation task completed when we try to run the task refresh identity cubes. Task is not running and error is displays as Task stopped by user. When you see the log file there a exception named Mark Invalid.

 

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Case 1

The main cause for this error is, If you have added more than one authoritative sources marked for one identity. The following exception will arise. that means you have added two Authoritative sources representing the same data if run the aggregation task the accounts will be populated with their name then If we perform refresh identity cubes task the accounts will not linked its respective manager account because there will be an ambiguity between two accounts which has to be correlate as manager account.

Case 2

In other cases if you have any accounts or identities not properly deleted.

Solution

The solution I found is to get backup of the rules and application into a xml file using the console.Shutdown the application server and drop all the tables in database using the sql scripts provided by identityIQ then create the tables using the scripts. Import the init.xml using the iiq console.Then import the xml file which represents the application object. Then if you run the aggregation and correlation tasks you can see that all the identities and their managers are correlated in identity warehouse.

Requirements Gathering for an IDM Solution

Posted on by Sudha Shanmugham in Identity Governance, Technology

Requirements Gathering

Understanding the AS-IS and TO BE states of the enterprise IT infrastructure is the most important key to achieve success for any Identity management. Approaching such challenge with a wonderful questionnaire would lead to a win-win situation for both the customer as well as the implementer.

At ENH iSecure, we face the challenge of requirements gathering with a strong questionnaire that helps us understand the requirements of the customer very easily. The following list comprises of some important questions during the initial requirement gathering which are part of the questionnaire:

Identity Vault establishment:

Identity vault establishment is the first step of any Identity management implementation. It involves creating a central identity store which shall be the heart of the implementation. As part of the identity vault establishment and future management, we would put up the following questions to the customer:

Initial Creation of Identity vault:

1. What are the sources that help us create the identity vault?
They can be delimited files present at the Unix location or active directory or a HRMS.
2. Are these sources distributed across multiple applications? In case they do find all the applications across which the trusted sources are distributed.

Regarding the Identity vault maintenance:

1. Are there any specific organizational requirements regarding updation of identity vault? Sometimes it is possible that such updations happen at a specific date to match the server loads and burst in server loads because of sudden peaks in usage. For example, Universities which admit many students at spring or fall.
2. How often would we want the incremental updations to happen to the identity vault? How often are complete updations expected?

Information related users:

1. What are the various types of people whom the identity management solutions monitors? For example, employees, contractors, rehires, customers and any other types of users.
2. What are the various operations that could happen to the users of the identity management system? For example, promotion or termination of employees could be operation on the user. Expiry of contract for contractors could be a situation.
3. Identity management solutions maintains users in various states. For examples most of the identity management solutions have an active, disabled or terminated states for users. How are these states expected to change with respect to various actions on the users?

Provisioning related information:

1. What are the various target applications that are present in the IT infrastructure that need to be monitored by the solution?
2. How does the communication to the applications from the identity management solutions happen? Is there a bus service that is running that needs to be passed through or can they be directly communicate to?
3. Are there any rare applications for which we do not have any prebuilt connectors to work with? In such cases we need to develop connectors for communication to happen.
4. What are the various accounts and privileges to be provided to various kinds of users with different attribute values?
5. In case there is any change is user attributes or state of the user , how to deal with the transition to new state of user? For example, in rehire kind of scenario, we temporarily disable the users. Also in case there is a state change, all the accounts that need to provisioned in the state have to be provisioned.

Requests based provisioning:

1. Is there a requirement for users to request various accounts or privileges in various applications? What are the various resources that a particular kind of user can request and what is it that they can’t request?
2. How should the various requests be processed? Is there any complex approval process that is involved? For example sometimes it is required that IT Admin as well the manager are expected to approve provisioning an account.

Using lists in Identity IQ workflows at approval steps

Posted on by Sandilya Krovvidi in Identity Governance, implementation-problems, Sailpoint

Sailpoint’s Identity IQ converts all the empty lists that go through an approval step in a workflow into NULL values. This does not hold the same with non-empty lists.

null diagram

For example, we have a global variable in the workflow which is an empty ArrayList ( [] ). It is going to be converted to ( NULL ) once it goes through an approval step. So in order that the lists work as per our need, we could provide a dummy value so that list is never converted to NULL when it goes through an approval.

Solving the problem with ‘&’ character while importing files into IdentityIQ

Posted on by Sandilya Krovvidi in Identity Governance, implementation-problems, Sailpoint

Sailpoint’s IdentityIQ uses xml files for importing various objects like applications, rules. If you have a script that uses a ‘logical and’ (&)  in your code , normally the import fails. This is because of the way in which normal xml files are read. This is one of the special characters.

To solve the problem replace all the ‘logical and’s which are represented by the character ‘&’ to ‘&’. This would make your import successful.

Kindly observe the following screenshot for reference:

ampersand in xml

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