Hitachi ID Group Manager Overview
The Challenge
In most enterprise-scale Active Directory environments,
there are thousands of user groups, used primarily to authorize
access to millions of files, folders and shares.
Managing group membership is difficult and costly, because users who require privileges are not normally aware of the existence of groups or which group they need access to. Instead, users need access to network resources and call the help desk when they get read or write errors attempting to access those resources.
The Group Manager Solution
Group Manager is a self-service solution that enables business users to manage membership security groups without assistance from IT.
Security groups are used by systems and applications to determine what a user has access to. For example, in a Windows environment, user membership in Active Directory groups determines what shares, folders and printers a user can access.
While IT staff generally understand security groups, most business users do not. This makes the interaction between business users and IT staff slow and frustrating for both parties.
Group Manager allows users to make requests for access using concepts they understand: which resource they would like to access (e.g., shares, folders), the access rights they would like to have (e.g., read-only vs read/write) and the person who will have to approve the change.
Group Manager improves user service, reduces IT cost and ensures that group membership is appropriately authorized before being granted.
Group Manager improves security by ensuring that changes to membership in security groups are properly authorized before being implemented.
Group Manager reduces the cost of IT support by moving requests and authorization for changes to group membership out of IT, to the community of business users.
Group Manager streamlines service delivery regarding the management of membership in security groups by making it easier for users to submit clear and appropriate change requests and automatically routing those requests to the right authorizers. This makes the request process painless and the approvals process fast.
Read more:
- Features:
Self-service requests and authorization for AD group membership. - Business Case:
Improved user service and lower IT cost through effective management of user access to shares and folders. - Screen Shots:
Snapshots of the Group Manager web interface. - Animations:
Videos of the Group Manager interface. - Slide decks:
Slide presentations that discuss how Group Manager works.