Optiv’s Julie Talbot-Hubbard sits down with SailPoint to discuss some business challenges that identity can solve

Video Transcript

Natalie Reina: Hi I’m Natalie Reina with SailPoint, this is Identity Talks. Today I’m joined with Optiv’s Julie Talbot-Hubbard. Optiv is a leading services and delivery partner with SailPoint, welcome Julie.

Julie Talbot-Hubbard: Thank you I’m glad to be here.

Natalie Reina: We are so glad to have you. So the first question I have for you is what is the number one business challenge you see most often that identity can resolve?

Julie Talbot-Hubbard: So it’s hard for me to think of one main business challenge because I look at identity really being able to solve three large business challenges that organizations face today. One common user experience, that’s something that you know we’re seeing it from our employees and our consumers really you know that driving of the conversation. Second one is productivity, when we think about when or when individuals will join the organization, how long it takes to provision their access, getting them up to speed. The last one I would say is compliance, so when somebody leaves the organization or being able to really understand and articulate who’s got access to what and making sure you’ve got your critical assets protected. With cloud and organizations really moving to a cloud or a hybrid environment all of those three areas really become more critical for organizations. So I really see identity as an intersection and helping organizations solve for all of those.

Natalie Reina: Now that we’ve talked about some of the challenges, let’s talk about implementation. Can you share two to three best practices that will set enterprises up for success and have some quick identity wins?

Julie Talbot-Hubbard: Definitely, from, from my experience both as a practitioner as well as leading our services team at Optiv I’ll break it down into three, three steps or three areas. One making sure you have an identity program. So having an identity strategy, identity roadmap as well as having business and I call support, support organizations, your HR organization, privacy, risk having those really embedded into that identity program. The second piece of that program is really around a governance process and having that where you’ve got a process to really govern and help prioritize. Whether it be the functionality of the identity system that you’re putting in place, process changes that are required or it could be just what applications are we prioritizing first based on compliance or again user usability requirements for the users.

The second, second best practice I’ve seen and I would recommend really is around asset inventory process and identity data hygiene. And what I mean by that when I break down asset inventory is really just understanding your assets, your application inventory, your hardware inventory. Where your most critical data sits, where what hardware does that data sit on because that again will help you prioritize effectively your roll out of your implementation. The second one is really around ownership of applications, understanding who owns AD groups within your organization. Who owns those roles with any application because that’s something again as you’re going into an implementation if you don’t understand who owns those or have that mapped out, that’s going to be additional work you’re going to have to do during that implementation and will slow you down. And the last one is just really around identity data hygiene and making sure your data is clean on your, around your identities, around your employees and your contractors.

The third best practice I would say it is just, I’ve seen this time and time again when you’re doing an implementation. A lot of organizations leverage one identity engineering team, which again I think that’s fine but I also think you’ve got to make sure you carve out enough time in their day to spend to the implementation because we all know that there’s operational issues that come up that they’ll get pulled into. So those are the three best practices that I would recommend that organizations implement really to have a smoother identity system implementation.

Natalie Reina: Thank you for your insight Julie, that’s a lot of great information for enterprises today to work with. Again, I’m with Julie Talbot-Hubbard with Optiv. This is Identity Talks, see you next time.

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