Agility and security seem to be on the opposite ends of the spectrum for organisations. Agility is often felt to be compromised when enhancing enterprise security. On the other side of the coin, trying to improve agile in business may contradict against IT security.

It goes without saying that companies need both, in this day and age where the Internet pervades into all aspects of life.

Agility is important for businesses to constantly stay on their feet and be versatile towards shifting priorities and market trends. Furthermore, building trust and loyalty amongst potential customers is what keeps a brand competitive and relevant, which is why being able to respond to customer feedback as well as deliver services exactly when customers want it is necessary.

In a similar breath, companies should not let down on security, given that threats from external parties are certainly on the rise and finding new weaknesses to exploit. The latter is especially pertinent given the migration to the cloud, which results in systems swiftly becoming legacy and traditional.

As the number of services and applications businesses utilise grow, it becomes more and more complicated and difficult to resolve this conundrum. Organisations are expected by their customers to deliver on time and speedily. In addition to that, applications, services and systems need to be secured, as well as, accessible across different channels and audiences.

Fret not, for identity and access management (IAM) is specifically designed to tackle any issues with balancing agility and security. With the implementation of a modern and robust IAM system, businesses can improve work productivity as well as IT security. Moreover, applications can be connected at rapid speed, and IT teams need not suffer from great administrative overhead.

Companies have a range of choices when managing their IAM models. IDaaS, or Identity-as-a-Service, shifts the burden of managing IAM models to the IDaaS vendor, so that the company IT department do not have to concern themselves too much with the mundanity of identity and access governance. They can therefore focus more time and effort into large-scale security initiatives. Likewise, for organisations that want more control over their IAM infrastructure, they may prefer going for an IAM model to manage things themselves. And an increasingly common scenario is a combination of the two. Hybrid IAM infrastructures have recently becoming all the rage, as they come as a singular offering by IAM vendors. Instead of maintaining and developing both on-premises solutions and IDaaS services, companies can focus on deployment, integration and benefit from automated identity management features. However, with identities and applications stored in multiple locations, it can be difficult to deploy and release applications online quickly and give users the access they need.

Regardless of which situation companies find themselves in, a modern IAM solution, can mitigate the problems they might face. With the integration of modern IAM, companies will be empowered to swiftly connect new services and applications, while granting the correct people access to the right things. All in all, end user experiences will be seamless and secure.