Business Layers’ spring-cleaning Roll-Out

Last issue, I outlined for you electronic provisioning’s dirty little secret – the onerous tasks associated with gathering, cleansing and normalizing the identification data that’s spread across the dozens, even hundreds, of data repositories on your network.

I’ve always credited Business Layers with starting the e-provisioning revolution not because it was the first to offer provisioning software (it wasn’t) but because it was the first to capture the imagination of the analysts, the press and the enterprise technology decision-makers. Now the peripatetic Izhar Shay and his equally committed team are thrusting Business Layers into the forefront again with the method of provisioning applications by removing much of the manual drudgery of prepping your systems for the deployment of e-provisioning applications.

In the next couple of months Business Layers will roll out, eh, Roll-Out. The service, which will be available from Business Layers and its partners, will automate the gathering, sorting, matching up, cleansing and normalizing all of the data that will be a part of your provisioning realm.

Roll-Out gathers user and provisioning data from sources including HR, CRM and ERP applications, as well as IT systems such as e-mail servers and enterprise directories. It then cleanses and reconciles the data, using existing information to extrapolate missing data and ensuring, for example, that all addresses for the same building are spelled the same way. Business Layers marketing director David Lavenda estimates that 80% of your data will not need manual manipulation after passing through the Roll-Out system.

But wait, there’s more.

After the data has been collected, cleansed, normalized and reconciled Roll-Out analyzes the rights, roles, responsibilities and other facets of each object’s IT profile to find similarities among the objects and their authorizations and privileges. Once that’s done, Roll-Out examines the attributes of objects with identical or very similar profiles and groups them by identifying attributes which help uniquely define the group. That information forms the basis for tentative policies which you, of course, can modify, remove or institute as you see fit.

The important thing, though, is that you aren’t starting from an empty slate. Roll-Out has identified business policies that have been implemented, either deliberately or not. That’s even better than the manual method where you feel constrained to justify any policy you might propose. Roll-Out simply formalizes the policies you already have.

The decision to go with a provisioning solution is an easy one to make. Implementing it, in particular starting the chores necessary to deploy it, has always been the hard part. Business Layers’ eProvision Roll-Out is a giant step towards making that deployment much easier.

CONGRATULATIONS!

I just heard that my new friend, Chris Apple who works with my old friend Sandra Harrel at DSI Consulting (http://www.dsi-consulting.com) has been named director of The Open Group’s Identity Management Work Area (https://www.opengroup.org/projects/idm/). Way to go, Chris – I’m expecting big things from your group this fall!