Can My Identity Management Solution Quickly Adapt to Changing Business Requirements and Processes?

Transcription

1 SOLUTION BRIEF CONFIG XPRESS UTILITY IN CA IDENTITY MANAGER Can My Identity Management Solution Quickly Adapt to Changing Business Requirements and Processes?

2 SOLUTION BRIEF CA DATABASE MANAGEMENT FOR DB2 FOR z/os DRAFT With the Config Xpress tool in CA Identity Manager, you can promote business logic easily, document the system for efficient knowledge transfer and easily display relationships between CA Identity Manager objects. These capabilities all provide time savings for the administrator and in turn contribute to overall reduction in TCO and better facilitates Healthcare system suitability. Security Solutions: Protecting Your Organization, Patients, And Information

3 3 SOLUTION BRIEF: CONFIG XPRESS UTILITY IN CA IDENTITY MANAGER Executive Summary Challenge With the Config Xpress tool in CA Identity Manager, you can promote business logic easily, document the system for efficient knowledge transfer and easily display relationships between CA Identity Manager objects. These capabilities all provide time savings for the administrator and in turn contribute to overall reduction in TCO and better facilitates system suitability. Opportunity Config Xpress is a CA Identity Manager utility that provides system administrators several useful capabilities, chief among them is the ability to easily move components between staging environments for simplified configuration management. It reduces the time and effort a system administrator must spend while moving components between configuration environments and thereby allows for more functional testing time. It also provides a change-analysis report that highlights differences between environments as compared to a current and baseline installation. It provides a push-button system documentation process that records the many system components for future reference or as a part of a system recovery plan. Config Xpress also provides a convenient and efficient method to display component relationships. For example, it shows which screens are used by specific tasks and which administrative roles grant access to those tasks. Benefits Considerable time can be saved with the ability to easily identify component differences and quickly promote these components between development, test and production environments as part of a configuration management process. As a result, the organization can better depend upon the identity management solution to provide consistent results and with a savings of time and effort. Using Config Xpress, administrators can quickly perform these changes, document the system and quickly understand the relationships between objects, roles, and access to more easily manage the system. All of these factors are likely to contribute to a more easily maintainable identity management system and provide for a lower total-cost-of-ownership (TCO).

4 4 SOLUTION BRIEF: CONFIG XPRESS UTILITY IN CA IDENTITY MANAGER SECTION 1: Business need Managing an identity management solution Organizations depend upon consistent and known processes. A number of these processes are often implemented by an identity management solution in order to automate them. However, to ensure these processes perform as expected; they must be tested before moving or promoting the logic into a production environment. An identity management solution is often a critical enabler of a business flexibility, if managed well. It can also be a significant impediment to the business if it cannot adjust quickly and reliably to the fast changing needs of today s organizations. Every organization has specific processes that an identity management solution must implement. CA Identity Manager enables that business flexibility through a number of features and one of them is Policy Xpress (please see related technology paper titled: CA Identity Manager: customization without coding ) where customized business logic can be defined without writing code. However, even with Policy Xpress the logic should still be tested before it is promoted to a production system environment. Any identity management solution has many components and determining which objects have changed and which ones to move from test to production is a common challenge for any administrator. This process is similar for any identity management solution today. The process to move a component like a portal screen or a business policy requires the administrator to export an XML file that defines the environment, then search through the rather large file for the desired objects, cut-and-paste these objects into a separate file and then finally upload these selected objects into the target environment. This assumes that the administrator accurately determined the appropriate and related objects that were needed to accompany the screen or business policy. If the administrator doesn t include all of the objects the promotion and test process from one environment to another will fail and the process will have to be reviewed and attempted again. This is a manual process that every administrator must learn and remember. However this is not an everyday occurrence so it is easily forgotten between attempts. Configuration management is a challenge in any identity management environment, but Config Xpress flattens the learning curve, makes searching through an XML file a thing of the past and configuration management as easy as pressing a button.

5 5 SOLUTION BRIEF: CONFIG XPRESS UTILITY IN CA IDENTITY MANAGER SECTION 2: Solution Simplified configuration management & more Config Xpress provides CA Identity Manager administrators with several significant productivity capabilities. This utility included with CA Identity Manager is installed as a part of the standard product installation and has been available since r12.5 SP4, but the utility can actually be used with any CA Identity Manager version from r8.1 and later. In this section, we will review those Config Xpress capabilities. Config Xpress quickly analyzes a current CA Identity Manager environment and displays the system s components and their relationships to other objects within the system. This is especially useful for any administrator that needs to quickly understand the system or just to review impacts of proposed changes to an environment. For example, it shows which screens are used by specific tasks and which administrative roles grant access to those tasks. How much more productive could an administrator be if the time it normally takes to understand the identity management components were significantly reduced? The next few screen captures show some of the display and analysis capabilities of Config Xpress. Figure A. System environment: access definition and configuration. Quickly load from a live system or from an exported environment file the details of your identity management system. The Environment screen shows the URLs defined for authenticated access and access for public tasks such as password self-service. The software version is also displayed among other information.

6 6 SOLUTION BRIEF: CONFIG XPRESS UTILITY IN CA IDENTITY MANAGER Figure B. System screens: attributes and relationships. Config Xpress displays all of the environment s graphical user interface screens along with their relationships with Tasks and details of data elements displayed on the screens. Also useful is the ability to see whether a screen is an unmodified out-of-the-box (OOTB) screen, a modified or a completely new screen developed by the implementing organization. modified or new screen relationships relationships

7 7 SOLUTION BRIEF: CONFIG XPRESS UTILITY IN CA IDENTITY MANAGER Figure C. System documentation: quickly captures the environment. Config Xpress displays all of the environment s tasks along with their related roles which grant access to the tasks. Each task makes use of one or more screens and this is shown to the administrator. Like the screens, the tasks are also analyzed to determine which are OOTB, modified or defined by the implementing organization. admin roles that grant access to tasks screens used by the task

8 8 SOLUTION BRIEF: CONFIG XPRESS UTILITY IN CA IDENTITY MANAGER This utility also provides a push-button system documentation capability that records the many system components for future reference or as a part of a system recovery plan. This document and the environment file could also be imported to a version control tool as files for long term storage. Figure D. System documentation: quickly captures the environment. With the click of a button all of the graphical components and configuration views provided by Config Xpress can be deposited within a single document that is exported to an Adobe PDF file. The administrator can customize aspects of this document such as parts of the title page and a free-format introduction section to meet specific documentation needs. CA Identity Manager CA Identity Manager A very useful part of the documentation is a listing of the objects and relationships that can help pinpoint performance hot-spots around a particular component that may not have been designed efficiently. There is also a listing of any active Web Services within the CA Identity Manager environment; this provides the administrator a quick security risk assessment of any Web Services that may allow access to third-party applications.

9 9 SOLUTION BRIEF: CONFIG XPRESS UTILITY IN CA IDENTITY MANAGER Additionally, each object can be inspected at a detailed view as source XML for further analysis and understanding. Figure E. Component details: XML source of components. While browsing any of the CA Identity Manager components the administrator can view the object s XML source for additional clarity of the object s definition and behavior. Show XML button provides this detail of any system component Here is a review of the configuration management capabilities provided by Config Xpress and how this utility can simplify the process. Config Xpress can reduce an administrator s time and effort while promoting components (business logic, screens, roles) between configuration environments through the following capabilities: Environment import from live systems or through exported files. Connect to live systems and perform the configuration management process or use archived and previously exported Environment files. Quick comparison between environments. For example, it displays the objects that have been changed between test and production environments. It is easy to compare against a current or baseline installation.

10 10 SOLUTION BRIEF: CONFIG XPRESS UTILITY IN CA IDENTITY MANAGER Can display only the changed or new components for targeted review. Administrators often need to know what has changed and Config Xpress quickly shows this view. Ensure all required objects are moved with the selected component. When business logic is moved into production, the associated and required portal screens are also promoted as well. The administrator does not need to know and search for such information. This avoids system crashes and errors by appropriately migrating all needed objects. All of these features can allow for more functional testing time by reducing the time previously used in searching for and the moving of objects. Figure F. Promotion of objects: select the changed objects. This display screen shows the differences between two environments for quick promotion of objects between the development, test and production environments. This shows two environments for quick comparisons

11 11 SOLUTION BRIEF: CONFIG XPRESS UTILITY IN CA IDENTITY MANAGER Figure G. Check that required screens are included with the task. During a promotion of objects, Config Xpress will inform the administrator of additional and required objects related to the promoted object. This better enables the target environment to operate properly with all of the required objects. SECTION 3: Conclusions Simplified configuration management Identity management solutions require the flexibility and adaptability to implement business logic and integration to many heterogeneous enterprise systems. In today s environments, because of the dynamic and competitive nature of business environments and shifting government regulatory requirements nothing stays the same for long. The end result: business processes and systems must be changed, and the identity management solutions supporting these systems must ebb and flow to meet the demands of the business. The question is often asked: How can this be done quickly and in a cost effective manner? The CA Identity Manager solution provides tools and utilities to enable customization without coding using Policy Xpress. Those same business policies can then easily be managed using Config Xpress. Config Xpress provides the administrator the needed capabilities to promote business logic easily, document the system for efficient knowledge transfer and easily display relationships between CA Identity Manager objects. These capabilities all provide time savings for the administrator and in turn contribute to overall reduction in TCO and better facilitates system suitability. To learn more about the CA Identity Manager architecture and technical approach, visit /user-provisioning.

12 12 SOLUTION BRIEF: CONFIG XPRESS UTILITY IN CA IDENTITY MANAGER Connect with CA Technologies at CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) creates software that fuels transformation for companies and enables them to seize the opportunities of the application economy. Software is at the heart of every business, in every industry. From planning to development to management and security, CA is working with companies worldwide to change the way we live, transact and communicate across mobile, private and public cloud, distributed and mainframe environments. Learn more at. Copyright 2014 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. This document is for your informational purposes only. To the extent permitted by applicable law, CA provides this document As Is without warranty of any kind, including, without limitation, any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose, or noninfringement. In no event will CA be liable for any loss or damage, direct or indirect, from the use of this document, including, without limitation, lost profits, business interruption, goodwill or lost data, even if CA is expressly advised of such damages. CS _1214