Identity Management (IDM) has developed rapidly over the last 10 years. Overcoming the language barriers between the business departments and IT, on the other hand, has continued to be of decisive importance for an IDM project over 10 years.
With vision, foresight and commitment, Fraunhofer employees Theodoros Paraskevopoulos and Klaus Scherrbacher took the plunge into self-employment in spring 2001 and founded their own IT consulting company. Today, deron is one of the leading IT consultants in the field of Identity Management (IDM) and can look back on numerous milestones: as a spin-off of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, deron started with 7 employees exactly at the time when the IT bubble was bursting and nevertheless expanded its sphere of activity. As early as 2003, the young entrepreneurs laid the foundation stone for the Düsseldorf location. In May 2007, “deron IDM Consulting AG” was founded in Switzerland. In total, deron grew to 30 employees today.
The secret to their success lies in the consistent implementation of the founding idea: to systematize and automate access and authorization management (authentication and authorization management) in order to increase speed, security and quality while reducing costs. It quickly became clear that the core task was to facilitate genuine communication between the business departments and IT. Without mutual understanding, either IT must guess which accesses and authorizations are to be created or changed for a specific person. Or the manager must master IT terminology in order to express precisely how IT should equip the employee. Both are difficult in practice and corresponding gaps can be found in many places, especially in the area of partial revocation of authorizations. For this reason, deron focused its consulting activities on the processes and workflows between the business department and IT right from the start.
The managing directors are always active in the operative project business themselves and want to remain so. “It’s far too much fun to find the decisive trick for customers than for me to withdraw from it and concentrate on administrative tasks,” says Scherrbacher. In addition, the market is developing extremely positively: Whereas 10 years ago a simple Meta Directory was called IDM, today mature products with workflows and uniform customer login are available for portals / Web Access as well as Business Role Management. Whereas in the past you had to content yourself with reports of the current authorizations and search for deviations from the target state yourself, today you get an audit that specifically shows the deviations between the target and current state.
There have also been some changes in the allocation of rights themselves. The formerly common rule and workflow based IDM is now replaced by role based IDM (RBAC). This means that new, highly complex rules no longer have to be written for every special case such as holiday replacement or project membership. Instead, an organization chart is stored in the role-based IDM, at whose nodes individual authorizations are arranged. By processing the individual branches of this organizational chart, the system collects relevant information and makes it the rule for automated authorization distribution. Unwanted combinations are prevented by the system so that, for example, a customer may never release his own order (Segregation).
deron takes this constant change in the market into account: the company regularly collects data for its studies. In addition, it is in continuous exchange with the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, various universities and numerous manufacturers. This research approach has made the consultants what they are today: Experienced partners in the areas of compliance, provisioning, IT authorization processes, security management, workflows, RBAC, SSO and process management.
State banks and insurance companies rely on the support of deron, as do universities, the automotive industry and retail – the company does not have a single industry focus. “Customers have been relying on our independent consulting expertise for 10 years. We are proud of what we have achieved so far, thank our customers for their trust and look forward to supporting other customers in optimizing their business processes,” summarize the managing directors of deron on the occasion of their 10th company anniversary.
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