EmpowerID 2020 adds several major new product features and usability enhancements.

New Features

EmpowerID Compliant Access Solution (Risk Management)

The reality for organizations today is that enterprise risks are scattered across many Cloud and on-premise systems and are often acquired by a risky combination of cross-system access. Given the growing number of enterprise level applications being made available to organizations, it is imperative organizations know the permissions models for each application they use. Otherwise, users may have more access than needed, resulting in unnecessary risks. To gain visibility and control over these risks, EmpowerID provides one of the largest IGA connector libraries available with the ability to connect and consume even the most idiosyncratic permissions models and inheritance used within your applications. In this way, each system's permissions can be combined into one comprehensive and business-friendly permissions model.

Compliant Risk Management

Compliance risk management aims to ensure that organizations deliver compliant access and that changes occurring in native system admin consoles do not create non-compliant access. To achieve this goal, current access assignments must be continually measured against a definition of non-compliant access. Therefore, to define compliant access, you must first define non-compliant access. Risks are a part of the business domain and must be defined and owned by business users as they relate to the organization’s specific industry and business processes. Defining an organization’s risk policies based on toxic combinations of technical entitlements such as application groups or roles is not viable. These technical objects have little meaning to business users and the activities they enable and the risks they pose are easily obscured and can change as underlying access shifts.

The new EmpowerID Compliant Access Solution simplifies risk management by giving organizations the ability to abstract technical access rights terminology from inventoried systems away from business users in favor of language more readily accessible to business users, their managers and those responsible for building effective risk management policy. Most IAM systems manage only the technical aspects of access control and, as such, fail to provide a comprehensive model that maps the entitlements in technical systems to clearly understood business processes. For example, consider the act of creating a purchase order in SAP. In that system, entitlements are designated by TCodes, and the TCode for creating a purchase order is ME21N. While application experts might instinctively know what the TCode means, most likely many business users will not. And that is one entitlement in one system. When one considers the many technical systems that could be used within the daily operations of a business — and the amount of entitlements available to users within each — it becomes easy to see how those responsible for managing access can spend an undue amount of time deciphering exactly “who can do what, where and when with their IT systems.”

Figure 1: Example of a native system entitlement

That is where EmpowerID’s Compliant Access Solution comes into the picture. EmpowerID understands that each organization has its own particular language for processes and policies and designed the solution with the flexibility to bring that process language into risk management as is. This model understands that delivering compliant access requires more than repeating “black box” speak to be truly effective. A system that simply repeats technical system language back to users does little to help businesses translate the technical rights in each IT system to the daily business activities necessary for accomplishing business goals.

How EmpowerID Compliant Access Leverages Your Business Model

The EmpowerID Compliant Access Solution starts with the premise that all businesses can be broken down into a series of business processes performed during the ongoing production and delivery of their goods or services. Each business process is itself, a series of tasks that can be performed by internal or external participants to complete that process. And each task in each process can be broken down into the functions executed in the process of completing that task. EmpowerID defines functions as “business defined activities that a person can perform.” Using this approach, the technical term “ME21N” mentioned above could be translated simply as “Create Purchase Order.” The activities are the same, but the terminology for the latter is immediately clearer for business users.

Figure 2: Native System Entitlements VS Functions

Using functions as the building blocks of what users can do in technical systems, organizations then build their risk policies around those functions using their own business language for those functions and policies. Once functions are named, business process specialists and technical application specialists map those functions to their representative entitlements in their respective applications. Once the mapping is complete, the risk management engine can be enabled to run on a scheduled basis to return users with functions. Using “Create Purchase Order” as an example, the result is that those responsible for risk management can quickly see who in their organization can create a purchase order and where to do it.

Figure 3: Risk Management User Interface

EmpowerID SCIM Virtual Directory Server (VDS) for Azure Identity Management

In today’s “work from anywhere” model, cloud-based identity management solutions are becoming the norm. Nowhere is this more evident than with Microsoft’s shift away from on-premise Active Directory federating with Office 365 to Azure Active Directory (AD) as the primary identity. De-emphasizing and even eliminating ADFS and federation are the future. Microsoft makes this even more apparent with its integration of the System for Cross Domain Identity Management (SCIM) protocol into Azure. SCIM was created as a powerful means of standardizing, simplifying, and automating identity management of users, groups, and devices across cloud-based applications and services and Microsoft is betting big on it. The problem with SCIM is that it has yet to become widely adopted and many applications simply do not support it. So, if you have custom applications with repositories of identity information or use an on-premise or cloud application like SAP S/4 HANA or SAP Ariba or even a major HR system like UltiPro, you are not going to be able to integrate those systems with Azure unless you or the vendor builds a SCIM interface for each. This is no small task because while the protocol is simple, building the interface is not. EmpowerID has stepped into the gap and built a Workflow-Driven SCIM Virtual Directory Server (VDS) that can sit between Azure and your non-SCIM applications. You simply connect those applications to EmpowerID and register the EmpowerID SCIM VDS in Azure. There is no need to wait for vendors or put in the time and effort needed to build a SCIM interface. EmpowerID takes care of everything for you.

Figure 4: Solution Architecture

Why should you use EmpowerID’s SCIM VDS for Azure Identity Management?

New EmpowerID Microservices

EmpowerID SCIM Microservice

The EmpowerID SCIM microservice is designed to help you manage your Azure tenants and subscriptions to include licenses and roles. Beyond the licensing challenges associated with Azure subscriptions is the fluid nature of the Azure infrastructure and how quickly new services can be introduced and then decommissioned. This fluidity can make it difficult for security and audit teams to meet their regulatory obligations concerning asset management. The SCIM microservice helps you address both these issues by giving you full visibility and control over both Azure Roles and Azure licenses via Azure License Manager and Azure RBAC Manager. For more information setting up the EmpowerID SCIM microservice in Azure, see /wiki/spaces/CloudAdmin/pages/907509785.

IT Shop Microservice

The IT Shop brings a familiar shopping cart experience to the license access request process. Users simply search for the resources they need and add items to their cart. Managers may shop on behalf of their direct reports as part of the onboarding process. When the user is done shopping, they simply submit their request. The workflow engine determines from your organizational rules, what approvals are needed, if any policies would be violated, and who must approve each request or violation. All participants are kept informed by email notifications and all requests, decisions and associated fulfillment actions are recorded and integrated into the audit process.

Figure 5: User Interface for the IT Shop Microservice

Azure Analytics Microservice

The Azure Analytic Microservice provides organizations with intelligent, real-time visual feedback on the drivers of their Azure expenses and the number of licenses being consumed by their organization at any given data point.

Figure 6: Azure License Analytics Dashboard

Azure License Manager

Azure License Manager is an licensable module in the EmpowerID Suite that is designed to help organizations inventory their Azure licenses and expenses across multiple Azure tenants for cost reporting and allocation of license expenses within their organization. According to research, of the 200 million Office 365 users Microsoft is reporting, 56% of licenses are inactive, underutilized, over-sized or unassigned. Azure License Manager can help you save up to 50% of your license costs by discovering licenses that fall into that category and automating Azure license management using flexible policies. How does Azure License Manager help with this?

Figure 7: Azure License Manager User Interface

Azure RBAC Manager

Azure RBAC Manager provides auditing, Zero Trust delegated administration, policy-based access assignment, self-service shopping, and access recertification for Azure security. Azure RBAC Manager empowers organizations to maintain an accurate understanding of their Azure security landscape, to optimize its management, and to ensure compliance with an organization’s risk policies. How does Azure RBAC Manager help?

Figure 8: Azure RBAC Manager User Interface

Azure Native Authentication

EmpowerID can be configured to allow users to authenticate to EmpowerID and single sign-on (SSO) into other applications to which EmpowerID serves as an Identity Provider using their Azure credentials. Once a user authenticates and does SSO to other Service Provider applications such as Salesforce or ServiceNow, that user can seamlessly sign out of all applications simply by signing out of one. The flow for both of these scenarios looks as follows:

Login Scenario — The user goes to SP1 and lands on the EmpowerID Login page for authentication. The user selects Azure Native Auth. Subsequently, the user performs single sign-on into SP1, SP2 and SP3.

Figure 9: Azure Native Authentication Login Flow

Logout Scenario — The user logs out of SP1 and multiple logout requests/responses are exchanged between EmpowerID, Azure Mutli-tenant IDP and the service providers.

Figure 10: Azure Native Authentication Single Logout Flow

 

The single log out flow from the above image is as follows:

  1. SP1 sends logout request to EmpowerID.

  2. EmpowerID sends logout request to Azure.

  3. Azure sends logout response to EmpowerID.

  4. EmpowerID sends logout request to SP2.

  5. SP2 sends logout response to EmpowerID.

  6. EmpowerID sends logout request to SP2.

  7. SP3 send logout response to EmpowerID.

  8. EmpowerID sends logout response to SP1.

EmpowerID Mobile App for MFA

The EmpowerID Mobile App provides multi-factor authentication (MFA) and chatbot help. The authentication feature provides both push and passcode authentication. You can download the app from the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store for Android and iOS, respectively. You can register multiple devices to your EmpowerID account and you can register multiple accounts to the same device.

Figure 11: EmpowerID Mobile Push Notification

Enhancements

Customizable Navbar

The object-focused navbar in previous releases of EmpowerID has been simplified and reordered to present users with a less technical, more modular interface. Organizations can further enhance the user experience and completely customize the navbar without writing any code or maintaining a complicated overrides structure. Simply enable one or more of the NavBarSection EmpowerID system settings, localize the text for that section, and define the appropriate Noun and Verb. And if you prefer the old object-focused navbar, you can bring it back by toggling a single system setting.

For more information, see Customizing the Navbar.

Figure 12: Customizable Navbar

Passwordless Login

In EmpowerID, Passwordless login is a type of multi-factor authentication (MFA) that you can apply to Password Manager Policies to allow users with the policy to skip the password and login using only their EmpowerID user names or email addresses. This simplifies the login process for users by not requiring them to remember their passwords while making their accounts more secure through multi-factor authentication.

To login using Passwordless login, users click the Passwordless Login link on the login page. This initiates the Passwordless Login MFA workflow, which asks the users to submit either their user names or passwords. The workflow looks at the Password Manager Policy associated with those users—and based on the Passwordless Login MFA settings of that policy—asks each user to authenticate using one or more of the MFA types set for the policy until they reach the required number of MFA points to login.

Figure 13: Passwordless Login Feature

T-RBAC Management Roles

The old Management Role model, which included roles that granted broader access to resources—such as the Enterprise IT Administrator Management Role—has been replaced with a more granular and functional set of Management Roles known as T-RBAC or Task-Based RBAC. In this new model, roles are prefixed by their function in EmpowerID and include the following:

These types of roles extend to every resource type protected by EmpowerID, allowing administrators to tightly delegate what users can and cannot do in the system.

Redesigned Resource View Pages

The View pages that users see when looking at the details for a given resource have been completely redesigned to present users with a more visually appealing and intuitive experience. Figure 14 below shows View page for a person that users see when viewing information about a person in EmpowerID.

Figure 14: Person View Page

New and Improved Integrations

Enhancements for Office 365 Hybrid Mode

The EmpowerID Office 365 connector provides support for organizations migrating user mailboxes from on-premise Exchange to Office 365 using DirSync. In those situations, EmpowerID uses RET policies to provision Active Directory accounts synced to Office 365 user accounts and sets Remote Mailbox Enabled for those AD accounts. In this way, EmpowerID prevents Active Directory from creating on-premise Exchange mailboxes for those users.

Support for Remote Integrations (Requires Cloud Gateway)

All account stores with local directories, such as Active Directory, LDAP, SAP, etc., can be inventoried and synchronized with EmpowerID via the cloud by enabling the Is Remote (Requires Cloud Gateway) setting for those account stores. When enabled, this tells EmpowerID to use the Cloud Gateway Connection for that account store.

Figure 15: Remote Integration for on-premise Account Stores

EmpowerID Orchestration Pack for ServiceNow

The EmpowerID Orchestration Pack for ServiceNow provides ServiceNow process designers with workflow activities, web services, and example workflows to embed EmpowerID capabilities within their ServiceNow business processes. Example workflows included in the orchestration pack include those listed below. These example workflows can be used as is in production but are intended to be leveraged by ServiceNow process designers in existing and future workflows.

In addition, the Orchestration Pack provides the ability to integrate an AI-powered chat bot virtual assistant, the EmpowerID Bot (shown in the below image), into ServiceNow. With the bot, users can perform secure self-service, such as resetting their passwords, at any time within the ServiceNow portal.

Figure 16: EmpowerID Chatbot for ServiceNow

VMWare ESXI Servers

The ESXi connector allows organizations to bring the user, permissions, and roles data in their stand-alone VMware ESXi systems to EmpowerID, where it can be managed and synchronized with data in any connected back-end user directories. Once connected, you can manage this data from EmpowerID in the following ways:

For more information, see Connecting to VMWare EXSi.

Web Page Designer

Workflow Studio includes a new Page Designer that allows you to design your own web pages using the same objects used in many existing EmpowerID pages:

Design Elements

Data

User Input Controls

Each offers choices you can customize to create exactly the page you need. For more information, see Page Designer Overview.

Workflow Studio Enhancements

GIT Source Control

All workflow binaries have been migrated from database format to file format, as Workflow Studio now uses GIT for source control. This change increases performance for the EmpowerID SQL Server-based Identity Warehouse and gives organizations the ability to take advantage of the modern DevOps model and practices, which include continuous delivery, frequent deployments, and automation. Workflow Studio developers can make file changes and immediately share those changes with other team members, where they can be tested and integrated into the production environment more quickly and efficiently than was possible using SQL Server as source control.

Azure Blob Support

Workflow instance data can now be stored in Azure blob instead of the EmpowerID Identity Warehouse. This reduces the amount of data being stored in the database, which provides much faster response times—especially when using EmpowerID hosted in Azure. This build includes two new configuration settings that allow you to make the switch.

Workflow Studio Items Can Now Be Edited in Visual Studio

All Workflow Studio class libraries can now be edited in either Workflow Studio (WFS) or Visual Studio (VS). This allows Workflow Studio developers who prefer Visual Studio to use the whole functionality of Visual Studio when writing a class library. Changes made to class libraries in Visual Studio appear when those same libraries are opened in Workflow Studio and vice-versa.

For more information, see Editing Class Libraries in Visual Studio.

Custom REST API Endpoints

Developers can now create secure custom REST API endpoints in Workflow Studio. For more information, see Creating Custom REST API Endpoints.

Easier Access to Important Aggregate Data

Many of the pages in the EmpowerID application have been modified to include new tabs and accordions to provide admins with easier access to relevant aggregate information. For example, managers and other delegated users can click the Report tab on the Person View page to view detailed resource ownership and access information for that person.

Enhanced Cloud Gateway Client for SaaS

The EmpowerID Cloud Gateway enables your EmpowerID Cloud SaaS tenant to inventory and manage your on-premise systems without requiring ports to be opened on your firewall. The Cloud Gateway is a lightweight client that can be installed on a Windows desktop or server machine in your on-premise network. The Cloud Gateway client then makes a secure and encrypted outbound HTTPS connection to an EmpowerID queue in Azure as a bridge for communication between the EmpowerID Cloud servers and your on-premise network. You can install multiple Cloud Gateways on-premise for fault tolerance and increased performance.


Additional Features or Enhancements

Feature or Enhancement

Description

Security Enhancements

EmpowerID-1808

As a security admin, I want it to be clear which operations are required to check out a cred for PSM to a computer and to allow approvers to approve without having this same access. For more information, see PAM Management Roles.

EmpowerID-1774

As a security Admin, I would like to identify groups that contain only disabled or expired users so I can clean them up.

EmpowerID-1989

Bot: As an end user I would like to be able to share and unshare a secret with others.

EmpowerID-1819

As an end user, I would like an easy to use interface for checking out vaulted passwords.

EmpowerID-1670

As a security admin, I would like to view any/all user agreements a person has agreed to and the version number.

EmpowerID-1612

As a security admin, I would like to easily assign Business Roles and Locations to Management Roles.

EmpowerID-1192

As a security admin, I would like a simple report grid showing all RBAC assignments to a Management Role.

EmpowerID-961

As a security architect, I would like to control who may make REST API calls for which EmpowerID components and views using RBAC security.

EmpowerID-933

As a security admin, I would like to run the EmpowerID Windows Services and App Pools as Group Managed service Accounts.

EmpowerID-928

As a security architect, I would like to be secure by default not allowing computer objects to be seen unless a person has a management role explicitly allowing it.

EmpowerID-927

As a security architect, I would like to be secure by default not allowing group objects to be seen unless a person has a management role explicitly allowing it.

EmpowerID-926

As a security architect, I would like to be secure by default not allowing account objects to be seen unless a person has a management role explicitly allowing it.

EmpowerID-849

As a security admin, I would like to ensure that passwords for Windows Services and app pools are rotated on a scheduled basis and updated/recycled automatically.

EmpowerID-511

As a security admin, I would like to grant the RBAC Actor set as the OwnerAssigneeID for a resource an RBAC Access Level for that resource.

EmpowerID-465

As a security admin, I want to ensure that each application using the login framework is recognized as its own OAuth application.

EmpowerID-304

As a security admin, I would like EmpowerID to run in a least privilege secure configuration.

EmpowerID-277

As an admin, I would like to schedule a password reset for an account and have it update all Services and App Pools with the new password.

SSO and Login Enhancements

EmpowerID-1950

As a customer, I would like to login using my Azure AD as the IdP.

EmpowerID-1994

As an SSO Admin, I would like to see and manage MFA Devices.

EmpowerID-1990

As an end user, I would like to use the passwordless login when logging in through the Oath IdP.

EmpowerID-1748

As a privileged user, I would like to be able to edit my own email address in EmpowerID.

EmpowerID-1713

As an EmpowerID Admin, I would like to see all relevant configuration information in one page for an account store and its associated resource system.

Integration Enhancements

EmpowerID-1199

As an EmpowerID Admin, I would like to create a Linux account store connection in the web.

EmpowerID-838

As an EmpowerID Admin, I want to create an LDAP account store.

EmpowerID-438

As an EmpowerID Admin, I would like to create a Custom Connector account store connection in the web.

EmpowerID-129

As an EmpowerID admin, I want to inventory and manage my on-premise Active Directory from a Cloud or off network EmpowerID instance.

EmpowerID-91

As an EmpowerID admin, I would like to create a Salesforce.com account store connection in the web.

EmpowerID-87

As an EmpowerID admin, I would like to create a Universal Connector account store connection in the web.

Workflow Studio Enhancements

EmpowerID-1336

As an EmpowerID Admin, I would like Workflow Studio to write-out design data of items to files/folders, allowing me to integrate with any source control system.

EmpowerID-1330

As an EmpowerID developer, I would like to be able to display data on forms using a radio button control.

EmpowerID-1312

As an EmpowerID developer, I would like to know how to dynamically add activities to my workflow via code at runtime to simplify it and allow it to be fast

EmpowerID-382

As an EmpowerID workflow developer, I would like the mobile app to display messages I send to the user when approving a signing request.

EmpowerID-381

As an EmpowerID developer, I would like to easily generate push signing requests and use the response in my operations.

EmpowerID-379

As an EmpowerID developer, I would like to easily be able to generate a push notification in workflows, jobs, etc., for signing approval.

EmpowerID-374

As an EmpowerID developer, I would like to develop back-end workflows to perform the fulfillment for front-end workflows that write to a queue.

EmpowerID-373

As an EmpowerID developer, I would like to process workflows on a back-end system retrieved from a queue.

EmpowerID-372

As an EmpowerID developer, I would like my workflow operations to write to a queue for back-end system processing.

EmpowerID-371

As an EmpowerID developer, I would like an easy to use framework for developing queue-based workflows and jobs.

EmpowerID-362

As an EmpowerID Developer, I would like to ensure the authenticity of workflow requests that I'm passing to back-end services and queues by signing them using a server/application certificate.

EmpowerID-309

As an EmpowerID developer, I would like to create custom WF activities with pre-defined line rules to make it easier to use my activity in workflows.

EmpowerID-286

As an EmpowerID developer, I would like to easily add MFA to any workflow process. For more information, see Adding Multifactor Authentication to Workflow Processes.

User Interface Enhancements

EmpowerID-939

As an EmpowerID Admin, I would like to be able to edit the language-specific translations interactively within the EmpowerID user interface

EmpowerID-912

As an EmpowerID installation engineer, I would like to configure the Core Identity Inbox settings. For more information, see Setting up Core Identities.

EmpowerID-863

As a system admin, I would like to see the extension attributes for a computer on its View One page

EmpowerID-369

As an EmpowerID project engineer, I would like better reporting of any data migration

EmpowerID-303

As an admin, I would like to see all the user accounts owned by a person on their View One page, even those from their other Person objects that are linked to the same core identity

PAM / PSM Enhancements

EmpowerID-274

As an admin, I would like to create a new account and link to an existing computer for privileged session management

EmpowerID-273

As an admin, I would like to create a new shared credential and linked computer object in a single process

EmpowerID-271

As an admin, I would like to convert multiple accounts to be managed as shared credentials

EmpowerID-77

As an EmpowerID system admin, I would like to easily deploy my PSM solution as a set of Docker containers.

Additional Changes for Version 7.151.0.7799 and later

SAP Connector

  1. Inventory behavior has changed to overlapping pagination instead of retrieving all table data simultaneously for each SAP table. This change has led to the overall optimization of memory and greater stability in large environments

  2. Trailing and leading white spaces in usernames are now ignored, as these sort of data-entry errors violate security best practices (by making the erroneous username indistinguishable from its valid record in the EmpowerID UI).

It is highly encouraged that these type of data-issues be cleaned-up to prevent indistinguishable entries and inaccurate reporting.

Deprecated Features

The EmpowerID Management Console has been removed. All configuration settings can now be set in the Web application.