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Hello! I’m Sue Bohn, Partner Director of Program Management for Identity and Access Management. In this Voice of the Partner blog post, we’ve invited Prakash Narayanamoorthy, Principal Microsoft Security Architect for Wipro, and Terence Oliver Jayabalan, Practice Partner and Global Solutions Lead for IAM at Wipro, to share how their company envisioned, engineered, and brought to market a one-of-a-kind solution for automatically migrating third-party apps to Azure Active Directory—shrinking the migration process from months to hours.
Seamlessly and automatically migrate SSO applications to Azure AD
By Terence Oliver Jayabalan, Practice Partner, Global Solutions Lead for Identity and Access Management
Wipro Limited is a leading global information technology, consulting, and business process services company. We harness the power of cognitive computing, hyper-automation, robotics, cloud, analytics, and emerging technologies to help our clients succeed in the digital world. With over 180,000 employees serving clients across six continents, we’ve been recognized for our comprehensive portfolio of services, commitment to sustainability, and good corporate citizenship. With a staff of more than 8,000 security professionals, Wipro has been helping customers in the Identity and Access Management (IAM) domain for more than two decades through our consulting, advisory, and implementation solutions.
Moving a mountain—app migrations and IAM
Our customers come to us from across industry verticals, but a common pain point for most of them involves user provisioning and access management for single sign-on (SSO) software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps. With Zero Trust now the gold standard for enterprise security, identity has become the new perimeter. Many of our customers are looking to modernize their identity and access management (IAM) landscape by bringing advanced platforms like Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) into their environment; so they can connect and secure all their apps with a single identity solution. With Azure AD, Conditional Access, multifactor authentication, single-sign on (SSO), and automatic user provisioning make IAM easier and more secure across the enterprise. Azure AD also saves money by reducing admin overhead for on-premises user provisioning and authentication—Forrester estimates the value of IT efficiency gains at USD 3.0 million over three years.
However, moving to a new IAM solution often requires the time-consuming task of manually migrating hundreds of SaaS applications from their existing IAM solution. This typically involves the admin getting the connection parameters from the existing tool and manually bringing it into Azure AD, usually by typing information or with some form of export-import function. Then, the admin has to validate those settings and do the application site configurations before the end-to-end integration/migration is finally completed. For a typical business, this process can require several hours just for one app.
Wipro sought to change that. We set out to build a solution that could automate migrating applications from one IAM platform to another while addressing the biggest IAM app-migration challenges:
- Large number of applications needing to be migrated.
- Need for a specialized skillset to carry out the migration.
- Extensive manual effort needed to migrate applications to a new platform.
- No centralized view of the vast IAM landscape.
- Lack of centralized monitoring, reporting, and management for IAM.
- No centralized repository for documents, best practices, templates, or delivery kits.
- Lack of IAM tasks and process automations.
- No simplified view of IAM operations (user details, who has access to what).
Wipro’s solution—Identity Management Center (IMC)
To solve this pain point for our customers, Wipro worked closely with the Microsoft Identity engineering team to enable a seamless solution for onboarding SSO apps to Azure AD. Our new accelerator solution, Identity Management Center (IMC), automates and accelerates the app migration/onboarding process from end to end. IMC supports migrating OIDC and SAML applications, as well as multiple IAM systems both as a source and a target—including a new functionality to speed up migration of SSO apps from Okta to Azure AD.
We make use of customer Okta instance APIs to pull information about the application into IMC, i.e., SAML and related metadata, any URLs, and policy information. As all that is pulled in, we transform it into a format which Microsoft Azure AD understands. Once it’s present in that format within IMC, we make use of the Microsoft Graph API to push that information into Azure AD.
Figure 1: IMC for Azure AD: Reference architecture
Once the application configuration is loaded into the IMC platform, migrating from one environment to another (Dev to QA, QA to Prod, etc.) requires just the click of a button. It begins with the discovery process in the Okta platform, followed by bringing the required configuration into IMC. The intuitive IMC interface helps users gather the applications’ onboarding details effortlessly via web-form questionnaires. Once the app configurations are onboarded, IMC automatically provisions the apps to Azure AD. Our IMC solution also integrates with IT service management (ITSM) tools like SNOW, helping to incorporate change-management processes for automated onboarding to Azure AD as well.
Figure 2: IMC accelerated process for SaaS app migration
Wipro’s IMC solution is a web-tiered architecture that can be quickly setup on customers’ on-premises or cloud infrastructure. And because IMC is not a multi-tenant solution, data residency and control remains completely within the customer’s hands. IMC provides a single pane of glass for monitoring IAM solutions across your enterprise—a single, holistic service-management platform which provides compliance visibility and includes accelerators and automation tool-kits.
IMC contains eight modules covering enterprise IAM:
- Data VX: Data validation and transformation
- AppOn: Application onboarding
- Unified dashboards: Singular view of IAM ecosystem
- Delivery toolkits: Industry best practices and tool kits
- IAM monitoring: Live monitoring via APIs and agents
- TestAX: Test automation and execution
- UAmatic: Unified access management
- Bot management: Bot execution monitoring
Figure 3: IMC modules
For questions like, how many orphan accounts do you have? Or how many concurrent logins are happening in your access-management system? Those are the types of things you can configure in the dashboard. For example, if you have 100 applications integrated to your Azure AD; validating those normally is going to be a huge manual effort. Instead, TestAX will run scripts for you at the click of a button—all the use cases can run in a series and provide you with a PDF report.
Results—fast, easy app migration
If a typical manual migration of 500 applications takes around 10 months, our IMC solution can reduce app migration efforts by 60 to 70 percent—dropping migration timelines from months to hours. Working closely with the Azure AD engineering team on the Microsoft Graph APIs and IMC integration, we’ve been able to automate the entire SSO app migration to deliver one-click onboarding from Okta to Azure AD, including:
- Live auto discovery of Okta apps
- No Okta or Azure AD admins required for SSO application onboarding activities
- Automatic transformation of Okta configuration into Azure AD
- One-click migration of configurations
- Automated ticketing with integrated ITSM
- Easily assign applications to users in Azure AD
- Provides Azure AD certificate
Teamwork brings IMC to market
We have a deep connection with the Microsoft Identity engineering team, and they’re really excited about our IMC solution because it’s the only tool of its kind that provides a seamless migration from Okta to Azure AD. We’ve presented IMC to multiple customers, and they’re excited too. This is the only tool that solves their specific pain points around application migration and IAM. Our team at Wipro believes that IMC has the potential for migrating thousands of applications, including deeper integrations with other ecosystems. The results have been so promising, we’re now building migration capabilities for more IAM solutions, such as Ping Identity and Oracle Access Management. We’re expecting IMC’s Okta-to-Azure AD migration feature to enter general availability in Q2, 2021
For additional information about Wipro and their IMC SaaS app-migration solution, please contact cybersecurity.services@wipro.com
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