Executive Summary
Many enterprises are saddled with an IT architecture that
has evolved organically over time. The realities of competing
priorities, limited staffing and budgets often mean that
systems and strategies remain in place far longer than
originally intended. This often results in a significant
burden of cost and complexity, and can compromise a
business’s agility.
Recognizing this reality, many organizations have embraced
modernization initiatives. Approaches vary between an
incremental “two speed” model and the more ambitious
“greenfield” method. Under either approach, a modern
cloud-based identity management strategy is a critical
catalyst in speeding the transformation process and
ensuring systems and processes work together seamlessly.
Such an identity strategy helps businesses increase agility
by deploying a single identity architecture, and facilitating
change through automating many IT lifecycles. Businesses
that embrace this change are able to decrease costs,
increase efficient and accelerate growth.
The Challenge: Aging IT
If there is any constant in modern business and IT, it’s
change. Mergers, acquisitions, changing priorities, new
applications, services and platforms create a huge amount
of flux in IT infrastructure.
Compounding reality is the fact that IT organizations are
constantly being asked to do more with less. To provide
value from shareholders, IT organizations push for
efficiency, which often means making tough prioritization
choices. When it comes time to choose between rolling out
new business services and updating legacy technology, new
services almost always win out.
But the long term impacts of these decisions add up over
time. Maintenance creates a tax on IT. Updates and changes
monopolize cycles, infrastructure to support legacy
applications strains capital budgets, and staff training and
retention becomes a critical priority.
Left unchecked these impacts become a massive burden
• 71% of the IT budget for US federal civilian agencies is
spent on maintaining legacy systems1
• 65% of enterprise IT spend is on “run the business”2
Two Approaches to Transformation
Recognizing the need to pay down this technical debt,
many organizations are embracing IT modernization
initiatives. Since no two businesses are the same, two
distinct models for transformation are emerging3, each
with its own pros and cons:
1. The “two-speed” model focuses on improvements
in specific areas of the IT architecture, while leaving
some areas undisturbed
2. The “greenfield” model seeks to make broad,
sweeping changes across the IT architecture
The two-speed model is often appealing to organizations
that wish to minimize disruption and operational risks. It
identifies a prioritized set of focused projects and changes,
and can be useful where budget constraints might preclude
larger efforts. To be successful, the two-speed model also
assumes there are no issues with existing integrations and
that current architectural complexity is manageable.
By contrast, the greenfield model seeks to make broad,
sweeping change to maximize the return on investment of
the modernization initiative. It takes a longer term view on
budget, recognizing that sweeping change will take time,
and that business benefits will accrue over the following
years. At times, this model is chosen out of necessity, when
an overly complex, “spaghetti” architecture is hindering
business growth.
Modernizing IT
Identity is a Key Tool to Facilitate IT Modernization
[1] WSJ, 2/9/16, Protecting U.S. Innovation From Cyberthreats
[2] KPMG Research, 2014
[3] McKinsey & Company, 2015, “Two ways to modernize IT systems for the digital era”
Updates and
Changes
Infrastructure
Staff Training
and Retention
The cost of aging IT
Identity Management is Key
to IT Modernization
Under either approach, one of the biggest roadblocks to
transformation is identity. 74% of enterprise executives
surveyed believe IAM is critical or very important to digital
business initiatives.
An Identity Strategy to Support Either
Transformation Mode
Identity and Access Management strategies should be
flexible enough to support either transformation mode, or
a combination of the two.
Okta Solution Brief
Importance of IAM in Relation to
Digital Business Initiatives4
The reasons become clear when you examine several
examples of the role identify plays in modernization
projects:
• Migrating an enterprise application to the cloud.
As seen in the massive adoption of Office 365,
businesses are embracing cloud-based technology
for agility and simplicity. But with the proliferation
of services, integration with Active Directory can be
complex, causing delays and frustration.
• Moving an HR Information System (HRIS) to the cloud.
Cloud-based HRIS offers myriad advantages, and
integration with IAM can drive efficiency by streamlining
the onboarding, offboarding and change processes.
• Building a web or mobile app. Digital offering present a
tremendous opportunity to provide value to customers,
but if the user experience is poor, adoption suffers.
Being able to support the latest identify protocols can
be a critical usability differentiator.
• Opening developer access to business systems.
Interoperability and integration is key to modern
business, but can open access errors. A modern identity
strategy can help businesses facilitate access while
remaining secure.
29%
45%
22%
3%
Critical
Very important
Somewhat important
Not very important
[4] 2016 IDG/Okta Survey of 58 enterprise executives
2-Speed Model
Extend Legacy IT
IDaaS for the New Projects and
Integrate to Legacy IAM
Identity as a core component
of either type of modernization
Greenfield Model
Replace Legacy IT
Migrate Everything to IDaaS as
New Enterprise-wide IAM
Under a two speed model, the goal is often to extend
legacy IT. Mission critical projects that are reserved for
future change need to continue to work with legacy IAM
solutions. New projects, and other projects slated for
immediate change, present an opportunity to work with
a modern, more flexible IAM solution. In this case,
cloud-based identity as a service (IDaaS) can act as a single
management console—interfacing directly with some
services and through legacy IAM solutions for others.
Under a greenfield model, replacing as much legacy IT as
possible is the goal. This represents the chance to treat IAM
as one of those legacy applications, migrating everything to
a new, cloud-based IDaaS solution. The benefits of a single
interface of identity remain, without the burden of having to
support legacy IAM solutions.
Under either approach, businesses will experience
enhanced value across three key pillars:
1. Decreased cost and enhanced efficiency
2. Enhanced agility to add and change IT services
3. Increased ability to deliver business value
Why Okta?
Okta’s modern approach to identity management is
uniquely positioned to help businesses take control of
identity to modernize IT across the three pillars of value.
Decreased costs and enhanced efficiency
• A single solution for identity as a service. A single
architecture and point of access means less cost
and complexity architecture
• Cloud delivery means no hardware or on-premise
software to maintain
• A simple administrative interface that makes
administrators self-sufficient, and not reliant on
customization
• Easy maintenance and automatic updates
• High availability deployment means a resilient
infrastructure less prone to costly disruption
Enhanced IT Agility
• Library of preconfigured integrations means faster
changes and updates
• Simple integration to a directory (e.g., multiple domains)
makes it easier to maintain a complex environment
• Easily integrate with existing and future on-premise,
cloud and mobile applications, as well as new services
• Integrated multi-factor authentication eases the burden
of delivering enhanced security
Delivering enhanced business value
• Deploy web/mobile applications more quickly to
provide enhanced customer value
• Programmatically federate with partners, or self-service
registration for contractors, partners and customers to
build stickier experiences
• Broad developer platform (e.g., APIs, SDKs) makes
integration and for richer business context
• Faster change management lets business respond to
needs in near real time
Okta Solution Brief
Roadmap to Success
To recap, a modern, automated approach to identity helps
take control of credentials to drastically reduce the risk of a
data breach. Where should organizations start?
We recommend you focus on these key milestones:
1. Deploying a cloud-based identity platform with
high availability and user store
2. Achieving simple integration as new access
requirements are introduced
3. Ability to deploy multi-factor authentication
4. The capability to federate with partners, or
self-service registration for contractors, partners
and customers
We are Here to Help
Okta provides an end-to-end suite for modern identity
management. We connect with complex service
infrastructures, enrich context by providing threat
intelligence to deploy single sign-on, multi-factor
authentication and automate lifecycle management.
We do all of that by working with your existing security
infrastructure to provide value.
The Okta Identity Cloud Security Platform
2
protections. Our platform securely connects companies to their
customers and partners. Today, thousands of organizations
trust Okta to help them fulfill their missions as quickly as
possible.
About Okta
Okta is the foundation for secure connections between
people and technology. Our IT products uniquely use identity
information to grant people access to applications on any
device at any time, while still enforcing strong security
[Modernizing IT] Identity is a Key Tool to Facilitate IT Modernization
Many enterprises are working with an IT architecture that’s evolved over time. As business needs evolve, IT must decide whether to modernize incrementally, or all at once. Each approach has its benefits and drawbacks. Download now to learn more!