Active Directory is everywhere and Azure Active Directory (AAD), its cloud-based cousin, is quickly gaining ground. Currently, nearly ninety percent of organizations worldwide are using Active Directory (AD) for on-premises resources (aka on-prem). That represents 500 million organizations and somewhere around 10 billion daily authentications. In fact, in the world of identity and access management (IAM), AD has become unavoidable and absolutely necessary for on-prem user authentication and authorization. You have to go through AD. It’s just how it’s done. Now, mix in the cloud – and Azure AD– and your management complexity just skyrocketed – and you could be in for a world of pain, if your on-prem or cloud identity environments are not managed and synced properly.

Active Directory (AD) is the foundation of identity and access management (IAM) at most organizations and, as such, is probably the most crucial technology on the network. More and more systems and applications depend on AD and Azure Active Directory (AAD) for authentication, policy, entitlements, and configuration management. If AD is insecure, everything is insecure.

SAP is critical to many organizations’ operations and success, and IAM is essential for EVERY organization’s success. You would think that it’s a compatible match, right? It turns out that navigating the relationship between the two sides can be tumultuous.

The identity and access management (IAM) team is on the front lines of security but are not SAP experts and do not know the intricacies of the popular enterprise software’s modules and their use. Then there’s the SAP teams, who support and enable business operations, as well as drive the user experience, who rarely claim to be experts in IAM. They know to not overstep their bounds when it comes to enterprise initiatives tied to IAM.

Identity and Access Management (IAM) is moving beyond IT security and compliance to become a valuable enabler that drives business performance, digital transformation and competitive advantage. But planning and deploying IAM is not without its challenges.

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When IT professionals talk about identity and access management (IAM), governance now dominates the conversation.

In years past when we talked about IAM, the hot topics were provisioning, single sign-on and role-based access control. But we must have gotten bored with those stale topics and needed something new to focus on.

Identity and access management (IAM) isn’t something you do once and then forget about. It’s an ongoing process, a critical part of your infrastructure that demands continuous management. Even if you have a fully implemented directory, it’s never too late to take advantage of best practices to help continuously manage this crucial part of your environment.