Cloud IAM Done Your Way

Digital transformation has driven enterprises to migrate their infrastructure to the cloud in order to optimize IT operations and save costs. Cloud deployments provide a number of advantages, like flexibility to scale up or down based on bandwidth demand. Another benefit is automatic software updates that ensure systems are up-to-date without deploying IT resources to manage the updates. Unforeseen hardware expenditures are also eliminated, which improves IT budget and planning processes. 

Additionally, the need for private tenants and data isolation has risen as the importance of data security and customization has increased. Oftentimes, companies decide to use a combination of cloud offerings. 

In the meantime, other trends are taking place that are accelerating the need for cloud adoption. More and more data and user information are being stored in cloud environments that are operated by various vendors. Many cloud environments are also multi-tenant, which means the cloud environment is shared with other users. In order to safeguard consumer data and remain compliant, companies are looking for ways to increase the security and privacy of user data.

In a private tenant cloud environment, resources are not shared with other users. This allows the enterprise to configure the environment and boost security to meet its unique business needs. 

The biggest benefits of physical data isolation are greater customization and enhanced security. It’s similar to living in an apartment building, where you have limited opportunity to configure the space versus a house where configuration options are endless to match specific needs. The ability to configure the cloud infrastructure to uniquely serve business needs saves IT costs, improves customer experiences and ultimately drives revenue. 

To address these trends and evolving enterprise needs, Ping Identity developed PingOne Advanced Services. They provide the benefits of a global authentication authority with highly configurable capabilities—and they’re wrapped into a dedicated cloud environment with data and resource isolation to support data residency requirements. It’s identity and access management (IAM) done your way. Let’s highlight a few of the benefits.

PingOne Advanced Services provide a versatile single sign-on (SSO) and federation hub that supports a wide range of identity and service providers for all enterprise resources. This ensures a consistent user experience for workforce, partners and customers. The auto-scale capability enables enterprises to quickly deploy additional cloud resources when the business demands and reduce them during slower times. 

PingOne Advanced Services continuously deliver new features and enhance security. They can also simplify IAM management with centralized configuration options in order to automate operations and achieve cloud-first objectives so your IT staff can focus on more critical activities to support the business.

Regulatory requirements around the world are focusing on keeping consumer data secure and private. Examples are the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the UK, California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the U.S. and Consumer Data Right (CDR) in Australia. Businesses must comply with these regulations in order to avoid large fines and keep in good standing with these governing bodies. Additionally, customer expectations around security and privacy continue to rise.  

The ability to deploy separate tenants ensures that organizations have the most control and security of their data. This enhances customer data security and privacy which builds customer trust and loyalty. It enables our clients to focus on customer experience without compromising on customer data security. Additionally, separate regional tenants support data residency and other regulatory requirements in order to ensure compliance. 

The National Restaurant Association’s digital transformation journey included modernizing identity management and migration of the underlying platform to the cloud.

The National Restaurant Association is the largest foodservice trade association in the world. They represent and advocate on behalf of more than 500,000 restaurant businesses, raising awareness of industry trends, hosting events, and offering several training and certification products and services. All told, the National Restaurant Association represents a $860 billion industry with over 1 million locations.

Phase 1: Improve Workforce Security and Productivity

The first step was enabling productivity and security for the workforce. It became apparent that users had multiple passwords to various applications that were difficult to maintain, and employees had separate accounts for various systems. This led to many IT requests to reset forgotten passwords that were labor intensive and wasteful for several stakeholders involved in the process. To address these issues, the National Restaurant Association needed to implement a modern IAM solution with SSO to streamline identities. Single sign-on would also improve productivity, strengthen security and ease the onboarding of future applications. 

Phase 2: Enhance B2B Customer Experience and Security 

The second step was to provide improved experience and security to customers. Because customers were spread around the nation across various directory databases, the goal was to consolidate the existing directories and create a unified profile. By enabling a modern customer IAM solution with SSO, customers can now quickly access and manage the resources available to them from a single instance. To maintain a superior customer experience, the National Restaurant Association continues to take steps to unify customer profiles. 

Phase 3: Infrastructure Optimization and Cloud Transformation

Maintaining and managing the previous identity infrastructure on premises required a lot of IT effort. To drive further efficiencies, the organization decided to outsource their identity management infrastructure to the cloud. This move minimized the IT labor required to maintain the infrastructure and allowed teams to focus on higher-value business initiatives like digital transformation. But more importantly, it will be easier to handle performance and scalability moving forward.

What Are the Next Steps?

The National Restaurant Association understands and enjoys the benefits of digital transformation, but they also know the journey isn’t over. The company has plans for setting up multi-factor authentication (MFA) for out of network users, expanding SSO to more partners and consolidating millions of legacy user records into a centralized identity store to enhance customer experience. As they look to transfer even more resources to the cloud for improved total cost of ownership (TCO) while maintaining configuration capabilities and control of data, PingOne Advanced Services are well-suited to this challenge. 

PingOne Advanced Services are ideal for enterprises seeking to automate their cloud infrastructure while maintaining highly configurable capabilities and enabling cloud transformation. Creating a seamless customer experience requires a cloud platform that’s based on standards, supports legacy and SaaS applications, delivers ease of use for admins and lowers TCO. PingOne Advanced Services deliver on all of this and more.

To learn how you can modernize your IAM infrastructure and meet cloud-first mandates, visit www.pingidentity.com or contact sales.