Introducing Maverics Identity Discovery — Simplify Discovery, Migrate Apps Faster

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
― Marcel Proust

The term discovery means different things depending on the context. It can be a new place, new information, or recently gained enlightenment. At its heart, discovery is about finding something you didn’t know was there. 

I thought about the meaning of the word discovery before developing Strata’s new first-stage migration product. Discovery connotes hope because finding something new inevitably opens up previously only imagined possibilities. And that’s what the Maverics Identity Discovery tool brings to enterprises faced with an identity and app migration. 

When embarking on a migration project, discovery is a necessary evil. It’s the initial stage of the project that takes a long time, costs a lot of money, and is usually full of headaches. There’s little sense of satisfaction for the identity team here, but discovery needs to happen before the migration takes place and real results are seen.

It seemed so unnecessary to have something that should be simple be so painful. So we looked at how we could make the discovery process faster and easier through software and automation. The result is the new Maverics Identity Discovery tool. 

Learn the story behind how Maverics Identity Discovery came to be, what it does, and how it will make a huge impact on your migration projects moving forward. 

What is the Maverics Identity Discovery tool?

Maverics Identity Discovery software looks at your SiteMinder environment, creates an inventory of everything contained in there, and provides actionable insights to help you plan for your migration to the cloud. 

Discovery is a free, command-line tool and browser interface that automates a previously manual inventorying and cataloging of your legacy system. It extracts the data, analyzes it, and presents a visual representation of all the information in your SiteMinder 12.8 deployment — in a matter of minutes. 

Maverics Identity Discovery shortens a critical process that once took many weeks. It also relieves the need to have many individual contributors — both internal and external — and turns it into something that you can easily accomplish on your own. 

From a recent article about Maverics Discovery in SC Magazine:

“Mergers, acquisitions, digital transformation and sometimes identity apathy can create [an] opaque sea of directories and roles such that every identity results in being a snowflake. Moving identity management from on-premises to the cloud offers that opportunity to consolidate directories, rationalize roles and correct the sins of the past, but that opportunity may require a Herculean effort to address. Tools and automation are a must or the manual effort will be punishing and, as a result, expensive.” — Frank Dickson, program vice president for security and trust at IDC 

Why we created Maverics Identity Discovery

Throughout the time we’ve been developing our core product here at Strata, the Maverics Identity Orchestration Platform, we’ve been asking customers about their legacy product environments. The identity teams typically describe supporting a range of apps — let’s say somewhere between 400 and 600 but this number could be anything — that are integrated with the identity system. The point is, it’s rare to get an exact number.

There are three stakeholder groups involved with an app migration: the identity admin/team, the app owners, and the end-users. For migration projects to succeed, all three groups of stakeholders’ needs must be considered. And often, the best way to delight them is to make changes entirely invisible.

The identity teams tend to know very little about apps and how they consume identities. The app owners usually don’t know anything about the identity systems — they just know if and when the identity system isn’t working as expected (generally because users cannot sign in). And users are very resistant to disruptive changes to how they log in, get access to apps, and do their daily jobs. 

In the Maverics Platform, we’ve implemented a migration approach that we call incremental or “live” migration. The keys to successfully migrating are knowing where to start, how long the migration will take, and where the greatest risks lie.

We built the Discovery tool because we wanted to automate and shorten the amount of time it takes to figure out what is actually in a legacy identity system, which apps are integrated, and where the bulk of user activity is taking place. 

Why use Maverics Identity Discovery? 

I have a mantra, let’s be productive in 10 minutes or less. That’s not possible if it takes months of analysis to figure out where to start your migration project. 

With Maverics Identity Discovery, you really can be productive in minutes, getting insights into the breadth and complexity of your identity deployment. Now you have the tools to draw a clear picture of the identity and apps landscape and start modernizing without impacts to the user experience and with no app rewrites.

There are no magic wands or silver bullets, and you still have to do a lot of hard work, even with a tool that automates the discovery of hard-to-find things in your identity system. But this tool lets you focus on the hard work instead of being consumed by tedious tasks.

How does Strata’s Maverics Identity Discovery work? 

You can’t migrate what you can’t see. Maverics Identity Discovery scans your systems and looks for all the apps, identities, realms, and other resources that have been added over the years.

In a fraction of the time it would typically take, Maverics Identity Discovery gives you a clear view of your: 

• Agents
• Domains
• Realms
• Rules
• Responses, response attributes
• Headers where attributes are set
• Resources (e.g. URLs)
• User directories
• Global settings (for rules, responses, etc.)
• Access logs

The results of this automated inventory are available in both a raw JSON data download and a locally run visual interface. The latter allows you to easily filter information based on criteria such as a complexity score for each individual app. 

“You can take your very complex SiteMinder environment and boil it down to a clear, simple report. The simplicity is the power!” 

– Leading Cloud Identity Provider

What are the benefits of Strata’s Maverics Identity Discovery?

Discovery reduces the discovery time from months to minutes and allows organizations to make deliberate, informed decisions about their identity and app migration. With the valuable new insights about how apps are using identities in your SiteMinder 12.8 instance, you can confidently plan your move to the cloud. 

The key benefits of Maverics Identity Discovery include:

• Faster migrations: automate the manual tasks of identifying and cataloging your identity environment to help you migrate apps in hours instead of months.
• Quicker insights: get deep new insights into your SiteMinder deployment in 10 minutes or less, and bypass having to gain buy-in from individual app owners across your company to do so. 
• Huge cost-savings: save millions of dollars by gathering the data critical to automating migration, reducing the manual efforts in each project, and retiring outdated legacy software and supporting infrastructure.
• A single, comprehensive view: access a rich set of export data to filter and visualize in Discovery’s intuitive UI. This single comprehensive view of your existing SiteMinder environment helps shorten migration efforts to your cloud identity system of choice.
• Break lock-in and improve agility: free yourself from proprietary application integrations and legacy identity systems lock-in. At-a-glance visibility into your current environment unlocks its hidden complexity and allows for simplified migration to any modern cloud identity system.

Discovery is a locally run and hosted tool; the information returned will always remain private to you and your team. You can also rest assured that there will be no interruption in your users’ access experiences resulting from running the automated process.

A new path to identity & app migration

Maverics Identity Discovery eliminates most of the manual work and gives you actionable insights about your SiteMinder environment quickly and easily. So you can get on with the discovery process and chart your course for migration in a fraction of the time and cost. 

Discovery is part of Strata’s Maverics Identity Orchestration Platform. As a user moves to the next phase of their app migration project, their results from the Discovery experience can then be leveraged by Strata’s Maverics Identity Orchestration Platform to quickly move your apps to a cloud IdP of choice.

Try Discovery today!