I’m as tired of hearing about the cloud and BYOD as everyone else but there’s an aspect to these 2 powerful technology waves that is potentially disastrous: they both threaten the blood, sweat and tears we’ve all put into organizing Active Directory for central management of policy, identity and access.
Active Directory is an awesome technology and has become the center of the universe for security and control at most organizations with very little downside.
But as IT departments and end-users embrace the cloud, a whole new generation of disconnected applications and identity stores are cropping up. This is a potential repeat of historic security, control and maintenance problems we had before we integrated AD with rest of the enterprise. We risk returning to a time where:
- users with a gazillion user accounts to keep track of…think weak passwords and helpdesk upheaval
- we have no idea what access anyone actually has...no visibility and even less control
- where our sensitive information resides...is your corporate information on Sam’s pretty good file sharing service?
- whether we’ve removed all residual access after job changes and terminations…de-provisioning “wack-a-mole”
And as employees bring their own devices and apps, the percentage of systems consistently and centrally controlled by group policy dwindles. BYOD is a potential return to the madness of the pre-Windows 2000 era when each server and workstation was an island unto itself in terms of configuration, access controls, management and health.
To avoid this catastrophe we cannot turn to the major software players like Microsoft, Google and Apple. Apple never has been an enterprise software company and doesn’t show signs of becoming one. Google, well Google is Google. Microsoft has abandoned group policy for managing consumer owned Windows 8 devices and is instead forcing you to deploy System Center for managing Windows 8 devices and it remains to be seen whether they will amount a significant percentage of the devices your employees bring to your network.
But a legion of ISVs are rising to the occasion with cloud integration and mobile device management solutions. In this webinar, I will look at the different types of technology out there in these 2 areas and set forth important evaluation criteria for comparing these offerings. In particular, I will discuss the need to leverage what you’ve already invested in Active Directory. This is where the sponsor, Centrify comes in. I think you’ll be as amazed as I am at the approach they’ve taken with integrating cloud applications and employee-owned devices with your existing Active Directory and the rest of your environment and presenting everything on a single pane of glass.
Please register now for this real training for free™ session!