Business success can often feel like a process of trial and error. Integral Partners’ advisory services engagement is a customized set of pragmatic recommendations that guide your company towards a comprehensive and executable strategy in identity and access management.
Rome was not built in a day—and neither is a successful business. There are many drivers fighting to push a company forward and they can blur the true path of progress. In IT organizations, balancing the need to deliver immediate results with long range and strategic value can prove challenging. To address this dichotomy, companies must take time to assess security maturity and develop a strategic roadmap focused on long term risk reduction and operational improvement. Without a multi-year road map, IT organizations may find the pressure to deliver results in a tactical manner creates blind spots in the company’s knowledge of its maturity to address current and future issues.
“Executives tend to view their organization’s cybersecurity strategies as more fully implemented than operators. They are also more likely to evaluate the effectiveness of their cybersecurity strategies through the lens of broader organizational goals, including cost control and maintaining reputation, than operators who focus more on technical cybersecurity metrics. Although respondents overwhelmingly report having a cybersecurity strategy, implementation remains a major challenge, as less than half of respondents (49%) report that their cybersecurity strategy is fully implemented across their organization.” – excerpted from Tilting the Playing Field: How Misaligned Incentives Work Against Cybersecurity, February 2017, Intel Security
Integral Partners roadmap strategy is dedicated to setting a concrete way forward towards meeting intentions and goals.
Our methodology starts with one simple action: listening to what you think the problem is.
- In-depth research of your business and industry through extensive, on-going unbiased interviews with employees and leaders in your organization, and supplemented with our continuous market and industry research
- Enable people across your organization to understand clearly what actions need to be taken, and by whom to keep your company up-to-date and competitive
- Customize our framework for organizational mobilization in business strategy and growth with clear implementation directives
Integral Partners advisory methodology is closely aligned with the AT Kearney Golden Rules of Operational Excellence in Security Management:
- Every corporation needs to understand its current security posture; align its information security objectives with its business strategy, goals, and value at risk; and then establish a strong and holistic information security strategy with a clear and shared roadmap.
- This strategic roadmap and its supporting budget should be regularly updated in response to the threats and changes in the business environment. When security needs can be expressed in financial terms, the board and business lines will be more inclined to pay attention.
Our high level of rigorous detail enables us to present a wide survey of the technical issues faced by the modern enterprise. Whether analysis of tickets, sales, information security, or access management, the story lies in the documentation as much as it does the knowledge of people within the organization.
Integral Partner’s roadmap is an unbiased and actionable report that offers up an executable strategy broken into smaller issues: who needs to do what, how much does it cost and how long does it take?
We concisely apply our innovative frameworks and templates to each engagement, so the resulting roadmap and recommendations are expertly tailored to the needs of the client organization.
- Careful assignment of action items to the best-placed people within the organization for efficient implementation
- Collaborative creation enables outsider insight to combine with insider knowledge for effective guidance on identity access management issues
Carefully constructed justification of actions to attain desirable results. The customization of the road map is unique to your business alone—not a boilerplate
What we do not offer is a vast document that spans hundreds of pages, destined to be left on the shelf. We sparingly apply our innovative frameworks and templates to each engagement, so that the resulting roadmap is intensely customized to the needs of your organization.
Experience has repeatedly shown failure to invest and revise a collaboratively developed identity strategy will negatively impact future identity funding and result in technology overlap and stakeholder fatigue.
Take the time to plan and invest in your identity future with Integral Partners, the returns are immense.
Case Study
Our customer was a new Chief Information Security Offer (CISO) at a healthcare company in California seeking to implement a new information security initiative while being constrained by the regulatory and compliance issues of the healthcare industry.
Challenges
The chief challenge facing our client was identifying who needed access to what, compounded by the lack of an authoritative access list. The issue was further exacerbated by a certification process that was led through email. Put together, the cost of auditing was high.
Combined with more typical challenges in information security and the regulatory constraints of HIPAA, the CISO reached out to us for our detailed expertise in healthcare identity and our ability to create and deploy an effective roadmap that would effectively deal with the challenge of Identity Access Management (IAM).
The Roadmap
We implemented our roadmap strategy as detailed above to deliver a road map that elicited different responses. Some were surprised at the challenge that faced them. Others were pleased to see their assessment that the business’ processes were just good enough was correct.
This mixed reaction highlighted the discoveries made in research: that while there were some real issues, many problems perceived as issues were simply distractions. With this new information to hand, we were able to collaborate with the customer to deliver a strategy that attacked the real issues instead of letting them continue.
Outcome
With governance identified as a major issue, we directed the client towards hiring a security program manager to take leadership and control of implementing the roadmap strategy. This first step gave our customer control over the best use of their budget, while also following a road map that strengthened the business moving forward.
By working with the CISO who originally contacted us, we were able to present a comprehensive set of arguments backed by solid data from research to present to the CIO. With a detailed road map that offered inescapable conclusions, the organization was able to manage access to information across the board while having the confidence of knowing that the decisions and actions involved were all in compliance with the legal requirements at state and national levels.
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