Can you Trust the Agent on your Active Directory?

If a company works with very few applications, user repositories would have to be mapped individually for each application. Every new user needs to be validated with each individual user directories to be able to access the respective protected application. This means that the same user has to log in separately every time he/she wants to use each application on the network. The inefficiency of this model was reduced greatly with the advent of Active Directory and LDAP.

A significant number of identity and access management solutions have the need to work with Active Directory as the repository of user information against which access is verified. Active Directory generally controls user identity and access permissions to everything from files, networks, and servers, to on-premise and cloud applications. However, integrating an Active Directory or LDAP with on-premise and cloud applications require third-party agents to be installed on your network.

Single Sign-on to the Rescue

Since most companies, irrespective of their size, depend on several applications for their operations, it is crucial to have a single point of control for access management. SSO makes sense in this context – but one of the most important parts of identity management is the agent which communicates between the Active Directory and the servers and applications. Here, an agent can be a complex Application Programmable Interface (API), which facilitates the communication between the different nodes of an Identity and Access Management system.

Most companies choose to go with third party agent providers to enable the communicating role played by the APIs. But this comes with the inherent risk of handing over a critical component of your company network’s security to another company. Can you really completely trust a third party with unfettered access to your business-critical data?

Fortunately, there is an alternative, where reliance on agents to ensure the seamless management of user identities can be avoided.

Agentless Identity and Access Management

Akku from CloudNow Technologies is an agentless solution which can easily and economically replace traditional agent-dependent systems, to protect your organization’s network while delivering robust Single Sign-on capabilities. Agentless SSO systems use direct HTTP calls to pass user attributes between the service provider and server.

Besides privacy and security, another advantage of going agentless is that service providers don’t have to stall your operations while performing updates and bug fixes every time they update their software. Agentless systems like Akku offer a truly seamless user experience for anyone who is authorized to be in your system. If your integrations work with HTTPS calls, which most systems do, then you are good to go! If your company’s users access SaaS applications regularly, then Akku can support identity management with a secure SSO functionality.

Akku gives you complete control over how your SaaS applications can be accessed by directly allowing you to monitor and manage the different configurations of identity management. Ultimately, this eliminates the friction caused by monitoring, managing and testing the compatibility of third party agents. An efficient agentless system truly simplifies the experience for your SaaS application users, thereby reducing risk probability.

Get in touch with us to know more about Akku and how we can help you simplify and take control of your network’s user management systems.
Contact us