Expert Requirements Gathering

Questions for Self IAM Assessment:

1. In your IAM project, have there been any missed requirements that caused a need to approve an additional budget to implement a fix?

2. Does it seem like many deployments require updates that caused a need for additional budget to implement a fix?

GCA’s Approach

At GCA, we pride ourselves on the thoroughness of requirements gathering. It is a simple fact that asking questions in the beginning is cheap and making changes down the road to unasked questions is expensive. We have hundreds of use cases and requirements-gathering questions that we will pull from when preparing for an initial meeting. Oftentimes it takes detective work to get all the answers, so being well prepared is our key to success.

What Clients Say About Us

“Their commitment to value-added delivery and correcting issues are not well defined by our internal business partners. They participate and contribute input during our annual Identity and Access Management strategy. GCA has been a key partner for the last 10 years.” – CISO.

Click here  to read more from this Gartner Peer Insights Review.

Effective Communication

Questions for Self IAM Assessment:

1. Has it been a challenge to effectively communicate IAM initiatives to project stakeholders?

2. Do business and application teams properly understand their role in IAM and help support its success?/em>

GCA’s Approach

Clear communication is the first key to success whether speaking to the project team, stakeholders, or end-users. When it comes to Identity Management, discussions tend to get technical quickly and it takes a concerted effort to ensure our communication is geared to the right audience. The fundamental principle is that you cannot make progress in obtaining a new budget or developing new functionality if all parties involved are not on the same page. In practice, this takes the form of a concise presentation adjusted for each team or audience that is involved throughout the course of a project.

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Business Friendly & Functional Documentation

Questions for Self IAM Assessment:

1. If an executive called you and asked you to provide documentation on a core IAM component, do you have this ready to send?
     Would you know where to find it?

2. How dependent is your IAM program on the working knowledge of your employees? If you had to replace the team overnight do you have the documentation to               ramp up replacements?

GCA’s Approach

With IAM it is often the case that a piece of functionality is distributed over many parts. For example, a workflow might call a rule, which uses data from a custom object, which makes a direct database call, and then something gets updated; the point being functionality often doesn’t live in one spot. This reality requires effective documentation that is easily consumed to enable effective environment support and to grow the IAM footprint. At GCA we have taken our documentation so seriously that we are hosting documentation for our clients (with proper access control) so that both the business and development team can learn how something works in IAM with just a few clicks.

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Testing Processes

Questions for Self IAM Assessment:

1. Do you have a master IAM test case document?

2. If you had to guess a number, how many documented IAM test cases do you have? 30? 100? 1000+?

GCA’s Approach

Following the design and development of any IAM project comes the all-important testing process. We take a three-prong approach to testing at GCA. First, the developer tests the use cases that were documented along with the design. Once everything checks out the developer hands over the review to a peer in the group who then runs through each test. After the first two rounds of testing have passed then what we call a “Functional Test” happens where each use case is demonstrated in front of the appropriate client stakeholders.

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IAM Operations Team

Questions for Self IAM Assessment:

1. Does your team have the right expertise to solve critical IAM problems in a timely manner? Have there been instances when this was not the case?

2. Does the IAM skill set and competing priorities on your team limit the success of the program? Would the business have increased IAM buy-in if your team had                     increased expertise?

GCA’s Approach

In some instances, IAM programs fail because they do not have the right team to support them. We have seen situations where a successful IAM program failed overnight when a key resource took another position. To help organizations keep the right skill sets, we offer Managed Services across all components of IAM. With this model, organizations have access to top industry experts to help maintain IAM programs at a fraction of the cost of maintaining in-house resources.

What Clients Say About Us