At Versent, our key role is to understand the vision and strategy of our customer, and the associated challenges and opportunities that exist. We have developed a specialised Identity & Access Management review and design methodology that we have merged from traditional architectural processes and the user centred design, into our own ‘Four D’ (Discover, Define, Design and Deliver) process. During our discovery phase, we learn about your business, partners, objectives, employees, related organisations, and customers that you service. We also gather a detailed understanding of the Identity issues and challenges you currently face. A key ingredient of the Versent process is to ‘as early as possible’ engage key stake holders and direct providers and “lighthouse” consumers of the identity solution to ensure any solution proposed is guided by real feedback and insights. We adopt a Contextual Enquiry approach where our Identity experts meet with people and ask pertinent questions to uncover key pain points without “leading the witness” into a specific solution.

The Design phase is where we design the strategy and vision and define a series of key capabilities and sub-capabilities that are used to define the vision, these are supported by a series of models, including trust, authentication, provisioning, role, and federation models. The current level of maturity for the defined capabilities is then assessed and documented. The target state is then identified and documented, with the required uplift to capabilities identified.

The Design provides the IAM Reference Architecture that is desirable, viable and feasible. We define a detailed identity component model that solves the identified problems, and addresses Area of Focus. The architecture is also supported by consumption patterns that outline how applications and users consume and leverage the identity ecosystem – a pattern-based approach streamlines future delivery phases through standardisation of onboarding and integration. During the Delivery phase, we define a Conceptual Solution, showing ideal end-state architecture, an initial architecture and the architectural evolution as dictated by the Areas of Focus, such as leveraging Verified Permissions for Fine Grained Access and Secrets Manager for storing server to server credentials. This is where the work from previous phases comes together to create the IAM Roadmap, which will set out a phased approach, demonstrating incremental value.

The roadmap then forms the basis for the business case. We work with your organisation to estimate new or uplifted components mapped into deliverables with supporting resource plans for delivery, including internal team structures and external augmentation requirements. This provides a phased investment plan required to deliver the strategy and architecture.

Versent packages these artefacts into a business case that can be used for executive presentations and funding requests. Versent works with all stakeholders along the journey to ensure that all the requirements are detailed out in the business case. Versent has a history of working with organisations to help uplift their identity controls and capabilities across the organisation for internal and external identity types. Our approach is to utilise our expertise in implementing standards based, pattern led, efficient, and automated solutions.

The focus of the IAMA is; • Current State Discovery • Target State Capability Model & Gap Assessment • Reference Architecture & Component Model • Data Classification and Protection • Consumption and integration practices & patterns • Business Case for change As part of the IAM Assessment, Versent provides experienced identity specialists. The team will work with your business ICT team to collectively understand build out a roadmap for change and uplift aligned to your business needs.

What we deliver: • Strategic assessment of your cloud workload security, processes and skills aligned to your business risk profile. • Roadmap of recommended activities. • A business case to change.

Software Associated with this service: • AWS IAM Identity Centre • Amazon Verified Permissions • AWS Secrets Manager