Identity and Access Management (IAM) has rapidly become the go-to framework for managing permissions, credentials, user lifecycles, and so much more.

However, it can be challenging to demonstrate the value of IAM initiatives to stakeholders. You won’t directly generate revenue, there will be upfront investments, and going from start to complete deployment isn’t a quick project.

Fortunately, you can still showcase the value of IAM immediately following each deployed milestone and moving forward into the future. Quantifying IAM successes depends on carefully defining and measuring outcomes, giving you specific results to show the true value of the significant project.

We’ve put together a framework to help you gauge the success of your IAM framework, spanning from before, during, and after deployment. Keep reading to learn how to demonstrate successes and communicate them to stakeholders.

Pre-engagement success

Quantifying success begins before any technical work on your new program has begun. Pre-engagement processes establish goals, evaluate needs, and ultimately lay the foundation for building your IAM program on.

Let’s take a look at the core pre-engagement steps involved to set you up for quantifiable success.

Define initial driver

Begin by establishing clear definitions of what drives the program forward. These drivers should be measurable, reflect current business goals or IAM motivations, and can be directly acted on. 

What are your expectations? It’s common for businesses to have unrealistic expectations both in timeframes and results, which can make success look like failure. 

Adjusting these expectations as early as possible helps define your resource expenditures while also helping identify any minimum viable features to work towards initially.

Understand your processes

IAM is woven into the fabric of your IT ecosystem and surrounding processes — it’s critical that you thoroughly understand these processes before you start weaving.

A few common questions to ask at this stage are:

• How do current authorization, provisioning, and de-provisioning processes work? 
• Who is involved in managing these processes? 
• Are these processes documented, and where is the documentation?
• What are your connection points?
• Why are specific processes constructed the way they are, and what’s involved in changing them?
• When are identities de-provisioned, and does the process effectively prevent compromised credentials?
  

There’s certainly more moving pieces to consider but they’ll be more specific to your existing tech stack and overall procedures. The focal point is how identity and access are managed throughout your entire organization.

Mapping complexity

Implementing and managing your future IAM program is no small project. Take the time to plan strategically by deciding on a clear and sequential approach for each milestone.

Granularly identify and map out the complexities of the project:

• What challenges should you expect?
• How are different IT systems connected, and how will you manage these connections during phased implementation?
• What specific order should you follow to minimize possible issues?

 It’s critical to have a strong understanding of the task you’re undertaking. Any unforeseen issues can cause delays or ineffective solutions post-deployment; invest the time and resources into thoroughly mapping all the moving pieces.

Assign a stakeholder

There will be several different stakeholders involved in your IAM initiative, but who will oversee all the moving pieces? An ideal stakeholder will be capable of understanding IAM, specific needs of your organization, and communicating value to decision makers.

 The chosen stakeholders should also be able to advocate for and communicate with leadership throughout the project. Communication might include requesting more resources, providing regular status updates, or conveying specific challenges that affect results.

Delivery and deployment success

With the pre-engagement process addressed, the next phase is development, delivery, and deployment. This is an iterative process rather than one big launch to help identify and correct issues, then scale up the rollout when ready.

So, what does this overall phase look like? We’ll break down the common steps involved to give you an idea of everything involved.

Sanitize your data

Data needs to be properly structured for specific IAM solutions and processes to be effective. As such, all data should be cleaned and sanitized before you roll out new technologies and processes.

Otherwise, data runs the risk of becoming unprotected, unorganized, and harms the effectiveness of IAM initiatives. A weak data layer and identity fabric will mean everything built upon it is likely to have issues — not an ideal way to start IAM.

Data sanitization and structuring often involve the following steps, although your needs will be specific to current capabilities:

• Hierarchical organization: Roles and identities will ideally align with your overall organizational hierarchy. Data categorization should follow, being segmented by which roles are able to access or modify it.
• Access control: Similarly, access to data will be managed based on roles rather than assigned individually. Establish procedures for giving data access levels based on specific roles, laying the groundwork for streamlined management.
• Principle of least privilege: Every role should only be able to access the data they need to carry out their daily responsibilities. Nobody should have more access than is strictly necessary. Effective data management practices will allow IT to adequately protect data at every step.
• Data classification: Emerging tools leveraging advanced technologies may help with recurring data classification, yet another way AI will impact IAM in the future.
• Audit trails: Data should be organized and structured to create audit trails that store metadata about data access, including who accessed the data and what changes were made. Audit trails help with third-party compliance audits or internal audits and backtrack possible issues.
• Encryption techniques: Most data should be encrypted both at rest and in transit to add another layer of protection and security. Any data that doesn’t require full encryption should still be masked to protect against unauthorized access.

IAM may focus on identities and how they access systems, but data is involved at nearly every step. Take the time to organize your data as effectively as possible.

Create a smaller, faster delivery cadence

Going from start to deployment with a big release can take a significant amount of time, delaying adding value to the business. Instead of focusing on deploying everything at once, take smaller steps throughout your IT ecosystem to develop, deploy, and monitor IAM solutions.

Not only will you start scoring wins quicker, but you’ll be able to catch any possible issues with each delivery. Any issues you find can be avoided in the next milestone, helping make each milestone more effective and less error-prone.

Take an Agile approach to developing and deploying IAM milestones. Focusing on sequential sprints with clear finish lines can be much easier than a marathon, especially when it comes to showing value to decision-makers.

Demonstrate enablement

One goal of IAM is to enable a person, role, or department to handle their daily tasks more effectively. Once deployed, IAM gives individuals the tools they need to enhance various aspects of their jobs, but they’ll need guidance.

Provide training and support to departments or individuals with each deliverable that impacts their jobs. Additionally, define specific metrics or tasks that were improved, monitor these metrics, and you’ll be able to demonstrate enablement to management.

Ensure correct workflows

IAM is all about workflows, both at the admin and user level. Does IT have access to the right data, understand permissions across different apps, and know how to map permissions to overarching roles? 

An ideal workflow allows employees and customers to easily move between systems while enabling IT to manage permissions as necessary.

Single Sign On (SSO) is one critical area that affects end-user workflows. Once deployed, users will authenticate once and then be able to move through different systems without needing to re-authenticate. This looks different for internal and external users, but both aim to accomplish the same goal:

1. Workforce: Solutions may include Google, Microsoft Azure, or other enterprise solutions involved in IAM. With these methods, employees’ identity and access are directly tied to how they authenticate with internal systems.
2. Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM): Customers are now accustomed to SSO, with social media (Facebook and LinkedIn) and Google, Microsoft, or Apple being established as ways to sign into customer accounts.

New SSO options are on the horizon as well for both types of users that may enable new levels of efficiency. 

Deploying SSO is a significant milestone and an easy way to create demonstrable value. Saving employees from needing to log into each app individually goes far in enabling efficiency.

Migrate legacy apps

You won’t be replacing every app in your ecosystem, but legacy apps will need to be integrated with IAM solutions. Otherwise, they may fail to meet current industry standards, best practices, or compliance requirements.

This process typically involves mapping permissions and user roles to those native to the specific app. Other solutions may need to be found for migrating legacy apps to conform to IAM solutions and overall industry standards.

Every app will have a different way of doing this, but the unifying goal is to integrate older apps with roles and permissions so they’re treated like every other application.

Additionally, you’ll need to onboard critical applications to a Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution. PAM solutions manage accounts with high access and require the utmost security. Existing critical applications must be integrated with a PAM platform before deployment.

Post-deployment success and evaluation

You’ve deployed a specific milestone, or the entire IAM migration is over — how do you demonstrate value from this point forward?

The pre-engagement and deployment successes lay the groundwork for evaluating post-deployment success. Once deployed, you’re ready to start measuring specific metrics and quantifying wins to communicate value to decision-makers. A few ways to quantify success include the following: 

• Is the new program working as intended? Don’t overcomplicate this element; it’s simple to understand overall operational ability, which communicates value on its own. 
• Can you operate the program properly? It’s wise not to handle the entire IAM development and deployment process alone. However, you should still be able to take over after the fact and manage all the moving pieces. You don’t need to maintain the nuts and bolts, but teams need to be able to use them.
• Are new solutions easy to use? How many steps are required for users to access the apps they need? Does it give a better user experience? The goal is to balance security with usability, which can take time to refine, but it’s certainly possible and worth pursuing.
• Has your security posture improved? IAM is fundamentally concerned with protecting user accounts, preventing compromised credentials from doing damage, and generally reducing the likelihood and cost of data breaches. Have incidents decreased? Can risk assessment demonstrate decreased likelihood or costs of incidents?
• Does the solution add value to the business? While demonstrating financial success isn’t usually as direct as increasing revenue, sometimes it is. For example, healthcare facilities can significantly improve the user experience and increase protections, which keeps patients returning. Explore ways your lines of business may be enhanced.

How to show IAM produces a positive ROI

When properly designed and deployed, IAM will likely produce a positive ROI. However, monitoring marketing campaigns or product development is not as easy. 

Monitoring the right KPIs and assigning value to them is critical. Everything we’ve explored above has paved the way for being able to convert these KPIs into business value, showcasing the ROI to management:

• Consent metrics: Data protection regulations require customer consent. Are you adequately gathering consent for every customer? Avoiding compliance penalties for lacking customer consent is highly valuable.
• Number of calls to help desk: Help desk calls incur a direct cost by requiring trained support staff alongside an indirect cost of taking time away from the caller’s responsibilities. If calls have decreased, value has been created.
• Identifying stale or inactive accounts: Can you effectively remove inactive or stale accounts? Generating related KPIs pre-deployment and post-deployment will demonstrate better lifecycle management, directly improving security.
• Decreasing new app onboarding timeframes: As your IT ecosystem evolves, it is highly valuable to be able to rapidly integrate new apps. IAM allows you to map permissions and roles to new apps, making onboarding them significantly easier than previous processes.

Partner with Indigo to position your next IAM project for success

You can see how quantifying and proving the value of IAM starts from the very first step—defining the program’s goals. While other steps are being taken, it’s crucial to remember how to measure successes to keep earning decision-maker buy-in.

We’ve broken down the process we use to show our partners the value of IAM. You can use these steps on your own or work with us to streamline deployment and be ready to thoroughly demonstrate IAM’s value.

Indigo Consulting is an industry leader in developing, deploying, and maintaining IAM. We offer various levels of involvement, from acting to helping guide your efforts to fully managed solutions — and we’ll make sure you can demonstrate the value of IAM along the way.

Are you ready to adopt IAM and all the benefits it brings? Reach out to us today to speak with an IAM expert and learn more about how we can help you find measurable success.