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How to Perfect Your Identity Management Strategy

In the days before the cloud, identity management and user authentication was often simply a matter of remembering your password to log into your (one and only) corporate account. Exceptionally, you might also have had login credentials for a central project or contract management application. Passwords were granted and controlled directly by the IT department. But with the cloud being here, users now connect to cloud applications without much IT department involvement, and the number of passwords per user multiplies, making identity management a different, bigger challenge.

Federated Identity Management

Shuffling between an overwhelming amount of credentials can stand in the way of user adoption, which will leave your precious software collecting dust, not to mention your return on software investment will be jeopardized. Federating identities is now a necessity as it solves the all-too-common root issue of too many unique logins and too many passwords.

Defining Use Cases and Selecting Cloud Service Providers

A critical counterpart to an effective identity management strategy that includes the cloud is the identification of user roles and requirements. An organization needs to draw up access rules that specify what a given type of user (role) should be able to access in terms of accounts, applications, data, and privileges (requirements). Defining use cases is critical in perfecting an identity management strategy in order to ensure the right access is provided to the right people without compromising security.

Identity Management for Users and Administrators

Federated identity management services can bring a different set of benefits for both users and administrators. For users, it provides the ability to login to their computer every morning, click a shortcut on their desktop and begin work directly in the Cloud Application without re-entering user credentials or looking up a different username/password. On the other hand, it gives administrators confidence that when a resource leaves the company the administrator can disable them in the company’s Identity Provider System. Talk about efficient and secure!

What About Contractors and Other Third Parties?

Finding a partner to assist with implementing an identity management strategy for your team may sound fairly simple, but what about external project contributors? By partnering with LoadSpring, the market leader in cloud project management, companies can still enable Contractors and third parties like Joint Venture partners to access project data via the LoadSpring Cloud Platform without giving them access behind the company’s firewalls. This is enabled through Site Level access where Contractors can be enabled to log in to the LoadSpring Cloud Platform without a company identity.

How LoadSpring Answers Identity Management Needs

LoadSpring integrates effective identity management capabilities into its cloud application hosting services via its LoadSpring Cloud Platform. Users see the benefit of LoadSpring’s single sign-on capabilities, which spare them from having to remember multiple passwords. Companies can now enjoy fast and easy user and license management enabling them to quickly add and/or delete users directly from LoadSpring Cloud Platform.

Its location awareness capabilities also track the place from which users are logging in and the different applications they are using.

In short, LoadSpring helps everybody to securely improve their identity management strategy.

• Users are automatically logged onto LoadSpring Cloud Platform without having to type in credentials, as long as they have first authenticated to their corporate network.
• Customer corporate network security parameters control LoadSpring Cloud Platform access.
• Customer corporate IT standards for account validation, password management, activity triggers, etc. are all reinforced.
• Simplify application access by eliminating prompts and the requirement to re-type credentials in order to access hosted software programs.
• Reduce calls to customer IT helpdesk to reset application passwords.
• Business-to-business or cloud-to-cloud identity federation for cross-domain account provisioning and management offers customer IT leadership the confidence that their corporate standards are being applied to environments outside of their traditional on-premise systems.
•  In the event, a user account becomes disabled on their network, that property flows through to LoadSpring Cloud Platform.