Compliance Management, Critical Infrastructure Security, Privacy, Security Strategy, Plan, Budget

Identity management: Fischer International

Start with the recognition that identity management is just too hard to do, cre­ate a solution for that problem and then morph it into a successful service and you have the recipe for a real innovator.

A driving motivator for Fischer's business model is that identity management products require too much scripting, are difficult to deploy and don't always help businesses to achieve objectives cost-effectively. With all of that in mind, the company set out to cre­ate an identity management system that simplifies the process while still remaining cost-effective to deploy, use and manage.

But that was not enough for this innovator. There are many companies, Fischer believes, that want to take the notion of doing more with less as far as they can. That implies providing identity management as a service, not a product. Adjusting its thinking to the SaaS model, this innovator moved identity management into the cloud and now offers managed identity management.

This, according to my interview subject, allows the customer to focus on its business instead of focusing on identity management. And, as it turns out, this was not a supremely difficult shift. Because supremely the existing product line is designed to be flexible, modular and easy to use, porting it to the cloud was not a huge task.

The key, simply, is staying so close to the customer that Fischer knows what businesses  want and what they need, and building a modular product that allows customers to right-size their implementations. That may mean starting small and working up. Another key to success is building a system that works and scales well in all sizes and types of organizations.

What's coming for Fischer International? Certainly there will be refinements of the products and services they off er. That will depend on customer input, of course, since that is how the company plans its future. It is likely to include such important identity management tasks as high privilege account management. And the result will continue to be multi-tenant products that sup­port service providers, as well as end-using companies.

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