What is our primary use case?
We are utilizing One Identity Manager as a provisioning engine. The main use case for us is to manage the identity life cycle of enterprise users in our context.
How has it helped my organization?
In my current role where I am managing this overall program, not only from the administration aspect but as the one whom all other departments reach out to with their request, one clear benefit is delegation. One aspect that I like about this solution is delegation. We have delegated administration in a way that we have access to new campaigns configured. This solution has a prebuilt option where we can configure campaign managers, and those campaign managers have a very nice prebuilt dashboard where they can monitor the campaign itself. That is very helpful. We can give these department's folks access.
Our identity landscape is very customized and unique. We are not only providing access for different users; we also have a huge set of non-human identities. We have a huge set of provisioned and service accounts. In our previous legacy solution, the issue that we were facing was that the solution was not very robust. We could not come up with some self-governed scenarios, such as moving the ownership of non-human identities, moving the ownership of service accounts based on the change in the managerial hierarchy, or based on users' movements within the organization. With One Identity, there are very good features that come prebuilt. For example, the department hierarchy within the One Identity solution helped us to build some automated logic, which was missing in the legacy solution. Other than the self-service features, there is also the ability to use ready-made capabilities and scale up on top of it. That was another reason to go for this solution at that time.
We make use of the solution’s business roles to map company structures for dynamic application provisioning. We use it quite heavily. In our context, we have two types of roles. We are using more of the requestable roles, not dynamic roles, and we also have dynamic role-based access control configured as per our organization hierarchy. We have defined entitlements and accesses that each department leverages. Accordingly, we have defined roles in our system.
The capabilities of this solution, in terms of out-of-the-box features and the ability for us to do customization on top of it, have helped us to come up with some automated processes, which were earlier taken care of manually by our staff. Whenever human intervention is involved, it is prone to error. It has helped us to bridge those gaps, which ultimately enhanced our governance score.
It has overall helped us to create a privileged governance stance to close the security gap between privileged users and standard users. With the processes that we had earlier, there were gaps in terms of changing the ownerships of privileged accounts and managing them in a way to have notifications in place. The majority of the stuff is provided out of the box to manage privileged accesses. Also, if you are a One Identity shop and have the Privileged Access Management product from One Identity, you are covered 100% out of the box. You do not have to do any customizations. If you are using any other tools for privileged access management, the product has very good features, which you can scale up and customize in your own context.
It has helped enable application owners or line-of-business managers to make application governance decisions without IT, but we are not using it that extensively for that. In terms of the product having features to do it, it has the features because we are using business roles where we have defined owners of business roles. Product-wise, there is out-of-the-box functionality for business owners to manage the membership. In this way, those lines of business owners are empowered to either revoke access or conduct a review on it. Earlier, with the legacy product, they were not able to do that because there was no such functionality.
In terms of user experience, once you get an understanding of the overall working of the product, it is not that difficult. There are so many underlying components within the product, and they are interlinked and working together. The initial impression is that it is just way too complicated for any developer to customize, but once you get familiar with how it is processing the information and how each box is working in silos, and what is the linkage in between, it makes sense. On a scale of ten, I would give it a seven. Three points to spare are for One Identity to enhance its documentation and maybe come up with more. They have a very good YouTube channel where they post content about One Identity. That is very helpful. However, in terms of explaining to new developers, there is room for improvement.
What is most valuable?
It has a lot of depth. It has advanced features. As a customer or as someone who is managing the solution, I like its self-service capabilities where it has lots of powers, and the users can select any reference users. The majority of the time, we face an issue where new joiners are not aware of what they need to have in order for them to do their job. One Identity has the answer where they can know this by selecting any reference users, which are basically their colleagues. This way, they can quickly know what sort of access they have in the system, and they can raise the same. The system will automatically identify it for them. It saves a lot of time and is also a very useful feature.
Another valuable aspect is the depth of the product. It allows the support team to reroute certain requests to different people, and within their request flow itself, you can ask questions. All these features are very helpful in our context.
What needs improvement?
There is room for improvement in terms of the ease of adding custom forms to onboard contingent workers. IT Shop is a great tool, specifically in terms of the self-service mechanism where it allows users to request different accesses. However, there are no prebuilt or easily customizable forms that developers can use to create onboarding forms for contingent workers. In most organizations, contingent workers do not have any authoritative source as HR. The majority of the time, the only authoritative source is the Identity Manager or the Identity Management department itself. I would love to see any enhancement in this regard. For user experience and intuitiveness, on a scale of ten, I would rate it an eight out of ten.
There is no out-of-the-box or very easy way to configure processes to manage non-human accounts. The functionalities that we have built are totally customized on top of what One Identity provided out of the box. It would have been nice to see some out-of-the-box or plug-and-play features available for it. However, the functionality was there, and we were able to scale up in terms of customization. Whatever we did was totally customized.
There should be some ready-to-use templates or utilities as the other Identity product providers have. There should be some sort of features that you can enable or there should be utilities that you can even purchase at extra cost. For example, it would be nice to see the utilities to manage privileged accounts or forms, onboarding forms, or other small things that different clients can leverage, even if it comes at a fraction of the cost.
The overall documentation needs improvement. This product has a lot of features, but people are not aware of it. The depth itself is still unknown.
Skilled resources are very difficult to find for One Identity, which leads us to the conclusion that there is very little certification or free information that users can just opt for and learn. In addition to the documentation, they should also provide more resources. Free training for partners would be nice because being a manager, it is very hard for me to locate skilled resources for this tool.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for a total of five years. I have worked with it for three years in a technical role and for two years in a managerial role where I am managing people who are directly and technically managing the solution.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is very stable. We do not need to do anything even with patching. I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I would rate it a seven out of ten for scalability because I feel that the architecture of the product is such that you cannot have very effective active-to-active integration between the job servers.
How are customer service and support?
For critical issues, it is good because you can call them, but for the regular issues, I feel that there is a lack of skilled resources on their side.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We had another solution from a different vendor, and we replaced that solution with One Identity. We switched because of the self-service capabilities and advanced governance features, which were missing in the earlier solution.
Onboarding from authoritative sources and onboarding directly to One Identity Manager for contingent workers was never an issue for us, even with the legacy solution that we had earlier. The main use case for which we mainly deployed One Identity Manager and replaced the legacy solution was the self-service capabilities. There were limited self-service capabilities in the legacy solution. So, we brought this solution, which complemented the automated provisioning of users in a way that not only the solution is capable of automatically provisioning accesses based upon the policies and templates that we define in our system, but it also has very good features where it allows the end users to do many tasks by themselves. There is a self-service portal, which is called IT Shop in One Identity's terminology.
In terms of consolidation of procurement and licensing, we have not used any other solutions in such depth or so extensively. We still have one use case, which we had with the previous product as well, where we have all Oracle E-Business Suite accesses published on our self-service. The same flows are valid with One Identity as well. However, they are managing the POs and other things. That is still with the ERP itself. We have not gone to the extent of taking responsibility for the functionality of each responsibility within our identity management.
How was the initial setup?
It is deployed on-prem. Our project was not just a deployment. It was also replacing the legacy solution. It was quite a unique and complex project. It took us around eight months to complete it fully because we not only deployed it, we also replaced the whole solution, and we had many integrations in place.
It requires maintenance in terms of product upgrades and security patching. In terms of One Identity upgrades, every two years, we have to upgrade because the previous version is not supported. The other thing for every organization is infrastructure vulnerability patching, so it does require maintenance.
What about the implementation team?
The team that performed the deployment and did the migration had three people: two technical and one architect. The team that is currently managing includes one administrator, one architect, and one developer.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It is cost-efficient compared to its competitors. It is cost-effective. I do not know about the other regions, but here in the Middle East, the competitors are almost double the price.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend One Identity Manager in terms of value for money, but I would not recommend it in terms of skilled resources. If One Identity increases education, then it is a very good value product.
In terms of the extension of governance to cloud apps, we do have such a mechanism, but we are not directly connecting with any cloud apps. We follow our process. We do it through a proxy or some sort of data power or middleware tool. So, we do have some integration with cloud apps, but we have not used the new feature. I suppose they now have out-of-the-box connectors to connect with cloud apps, but we are not using that feature as of now because it requires a separate license. Unfortunately, we have a short budget on that ground. However, from what I heard from my developers, it is a very nice feature, and it is easy to connect, but we do not have the use case to validate.
Overall, I would rate One Identity Manager an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.