Let’s now laydown an optimistic approach to leverage all the benefits listed above and more, resolve some of the blockers along the way-
- Discover and evaluate the application landscape. Shadow IT discovery management is highly recommended during this phase. These can be accomplished by using existing tools, custom scripts to query current federation providers and feeding the information to the next phase.
- Plan & Prepare – Often overused terms in project management, this implicates a lot of importance in our current scenario. Once there is application specific data , a common recommendation is to prioritize and prepare based on criteria like usage, complexity, compatibility, test patterns, provisioning, budget, resourcing, integration timelines & other significant dependencies.
- Then comes the most awaited phase, Deploy! Let’s encourage integrating new applications for single sign on from the very outset as an organization-wide strategy. Collating a list of initial set of applications of varied shapes & sizes is desired. This could serve as an important tool to test patterns when we have engineers, vendors pushing towards our common goal. At Cloudneo, We have encountered organizations selecting least impactful applications initially and seen some extremely brave teams who decided to migrate the high usage ones first. Take your pick based on the organization’s risk appetite.
- Operationalize & keep deploying, implementing , integrating! Feedback to various cloud vendors is an essential step in this journey. Not only do they benefit by reducing the integration burden for other customers, your time to market reduces for newer business applications. Application owners tend to absorb the risks and own company-wide communications.
As one can observe from the thoughts above, apart from having a technical acumen, being quite passionate about documenting, automating some of the operational workload achieves significance. A Program/Project Manager, who is equally passionate about process & technology would prove beneficial ? Perhaps, an interactive session with CloudNeo architects ?
We don’t see an end to Integrating applications to cloud identity providers.it’s rather an ongoing process. Let’s plan, prepare & deploy !