by Erik Huckle
I have been fortunate to have traveled to several countries outside of the United States. One of the best ways to travel is to meet a friend in a new location and leverage their local knowledge to navigate the terrain effectively. TripAdvisor and Yelp don’t stand a chance against a good friend who can easily traverse local customs, find the best historical sites, and point out the best restaurants.
One of the most memorable trips of my life was a trip to Jamshedpur, India, for a friend’s wedding. I started trekking through Ladakh and Leh in Northern India with a graduate school classmate. He took the lead on hiring a local guide, planning out where to stay, and making sure we visited the best landmarks.
We built our “Role Quality and Filtering” feature on the understanding that our users need a trusted guide in a complex environment. Creating an access model is challenging. We provide a clear understanding and guidance into our Access Modeling product’s roles.
We prioritize the highest impact roles and then allow filtering and sorting along with access similarity, the total number of identities, and total entitlement, to compare and contrast discovered roles. Like my trusted friend who helped me navigate a new country, SailPoint guides users through complex and nuanced terrain. The Role Prioritization feature evolves the tools currently available in Access Modeling. Instead of users searching for the right roles to build, Access Modeling triages the best functions to create first, reducing the time needed for analyzing roles.
For the next portion of the trip, we went to a wedding in Jamshedpur. This was a cultural experience unlike any I had previously experienced. I have been to a few weddings before, but not like Rajesh and Akriti’s marriage. In this multiple-day celebration, I was one of 800+ attendees, primarily locals, who participated in choreographed dances, street parades, and the wedding itself.
SailPoint has years of experience navigating identity governance for our customers. We found that users of Access Modeling had a hard time analyzing their role models due to the “noise” of Common Access roles and the associated entitlements. The Discover Common Access feature identifies existing common access, surfaces those for review, labels them, and removes them and the related entitlements from future Role Insights and Access Request Recommendations sessions.
Users can work on these specialized roles via the dashboard, which will allow a user to review and adjust each tagged role. In Q4, users will define new common access layers such as Employees, allContractors, AustinUsers. Each tagged role will then exclude its entitlements from the graph to ensure new parts discovered are in addition to the standard access already provided.
In my last days in India, I had a few hours free to visit one of the world’s wonders, the Taj Mahal. As my driver fell asleep, I took over and was forced to drive a stick shift SUV on unfamiliar roads. I was ultimately rewarded with a fantastic view and experience I will never forget.
Every environment is unique. It is essential to have great friends to help navigate a new place as I had in India. SailPoint’s experience across industries and companies helps provide both the best practices and the best platform to manage a company’s unique access model.
