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 security groups.
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, printers, e-mail distribution lists and other network resources 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.
The Group Manager user interface enables business users to request things they understand (e.g., access files on a given folder or send documents to a given printer). Group Manager automatically identifies the groups a user would require to perform the desired action and submits an appropriate workflow request to the appropriate group owner or other authorizer, asking for the relevant group membership.
Group Manager improves user service, reduces IT support cost and delay and ensures that group membership is appropriately authorized before being granted.
Group Manager:
- Is ideal for contractors or employees who are given short term assignments and need to be quickly provisioned with security privileges that pertain to their new assignment or project.
- Reduces workload on IT administrators by offloading group membership management to users.
- Improves productivity for all users who need to access network resources to which they did not previously have rights.
Read more:
- Screen Shots:
Snapshots of the Group Manager web interface. - Slide decks:
Slide presentations that discuss how Group Manager works.