One Identity Hybrid Subscription
Recently, we have released a new version of One Identity Safeguard, Password Manager and Active Roles. Each of these releases now offers the One Identity Hybrid Subscription enabling you to ‘join’ your on-prem product with our One Identity Starling cloud platform. Throughout 2018 and 2019 most One Identity on-premise products will include this new ‘join’ feature. This year alone you’ll also see in Cloud Access Manager, One Identity Manager, One Identity Manager Data Governance Edition and other One Identity products.
Why is the One Identity Hybrid Subscription important to our customers? In order to answer that question I want tell you a bit about how the cloud, Microsoft Azure specifically, has changed the way we develop software here at One Identity. I joined Quest Software in 2005. Back then, the cloud wasn’t really “there” and all of our customers purchased our software for installation on their premises. Over that last 10 years we have had to struggle with how to implement new features in each of our products, especially when a particular feature in one product is a feature already in another product or on that product’s roadmap. What usually happened was multiple product teams were implementing similar or nearly similar features in multiple products. Not only was this a waste of resources but it is also difficult for our customer to understand why a feature is integrated in a particular way in product X but in a different way in product Y.
Now, fast-forward to Microsoft Azure and other cloud providers starting to grab more and more market share and more and more customers asking about One Identity’s cloud strategy. We began to develop our first products on Azure and immediately realized that the foundation of a cloud product or feature was one or more micro-services. Each micro-service could be updated and any product or feature that leveraged that particular micro-service was immediately updated. Every customer got the update immediately – no waiting around for a download and internal resources to deploy the latest release. What a benefit for our customers and what a benefit for us because we updated a micro-service and all features or products that used that micro-service were updated immediately– no waiting on our dev teams to all catch up!
We then began to think about how we could build more and more capabilities in the cloud. We even adopted a “cloud-first” development mentality. But how would our existing on-prem customers benefit? We really didn’t want to leave our on-prem customers behind while we started building our latest solutions in One Identity Starling, our platform that is based on Microsoft Azure. That’s when the One Identity Hybrid Subscription (OIHS) was envisioned. Instead of adding, for example, multi-factor authentication (MFA) to each of our products why not add MFA to Starling and ‘join’ any on-premise product to Starling to leverage MFA? So that’s why we built Starling Two-Factor Authentication (S2FA). With the One Identity Hybrid Subscription, any product that enables the ‘join’ to Starling will get unlimited usage of S2FA. We did the same when developing Starling Identity Analytics and Risk Intelligence (IARI). So with the OIHS, on-prem products like One Identity Safeguard or Active Roles can also integrate with IARI to help reduce their attack surface and thus reduce the chances of being hacked.
The purpose of the One Identity Hybrid Subscription is to help the thousands of customers we have that are running on-premise versions of our software ‘join’ the cloud, but allow each customer to do so on their own terms and own timing. We will continuously make available new products and features to our One Identity Starling SaaS platform. With the One Identity Hybrid Subscription, customers can use these immediately for their One Identity on-prem solutions and their subscription continues to add value. This way, everyone wins. One Identity wins through better allocation of resources and a “write-once, publish to many” strategy while customers win by being able to immediately leverage these new features or solutions without having to abandon their on-premise software.
There's a great video which shows the OIHS and how it can be configured in the three products mentioned above: https://youtu.be/9MhCY48r_8s
