Technical Debt: A Scary Story to Tell in the Dark

And how to send it back from whence it came!

Boo!

Last week, we were thrilled to announce the launch of Radiant Logic’s Total Economic Impact (TEI), a study that Forrester Consulting produced from extensive research into five long-standing Radiant Logic customers’ deployment of the RadiantOne Intelligent Identity Data Platform.

This study can be a helpful guide to more strategically invest as you look into your crystal ball and plan IT spend for the next year and beyond. Getting maximum value out of past and future identity investments, and slashing spending where you can, is key—and much more easily done with RadiantOne in the architecture.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be exploring more in depth some of the findings from the study, which found six major areas of benefit to our customers:

• Reduction in technical debt
• Reduced risk of data security breach
• Avoided labor costs
• Operational efficiency gains
• Cost savings from faster time-to-value
• Reduction in audit and compliance costs

The most eye-popping outcome Forrester found was the reduction in technical debt that Radiant Logic customers can (grim) reap(er).

Budget-Sucking Identity Systems 

Large, complex organizations are often haunted by an accumulation of legacy infrastructure, Frankenstein-like identity systems, and tightly coupled services that are difficult to evolve or get out of, even long after they’ve become obsolete. Some zombies like ODSEE, eDirectory, etc. are so painful to replace that organizations maintain them for years after they should have been laid to rest. Other organizations think migrating to the cloud offers an escape—only to find that this move only adds to their debt, becoming another redundant silo of identity data that they have to support and pay for.

These systems are frighteningly expensive to own, not only in terms of licensing, but also due to maintenance and support fees, wasted time troubleshooting, and opportunity cost—all just to keep a decomposing system alive (it’s aliiiiiiiive!).

Don’t let these walking dead technologies eat your budget.

The Call is Coming from Inside the House!

Because so many organizations are dealing with labyrinthian cases of identity sprawl causing:

• Ineffective legacy architecture
• Inaccessible data
• Complex and inefficient IAM processes
• Limited ability to work on strategic goals

…they often have a hard time with basic business tasks—like navigating mergers and acquisitions, getting new employees up and running, deploying new applications.

Add to that repeated security breaches due to lack of visibility and control of identity, and many identity teams end up hating their identity management and directory services—and asking themselves why it won’t just DIE.

But there is hope, as evidenced by the TEI study. For the study, Forrester built a composite organization to represent a “typical” customer and the value they could expect from RadiantOne. This composite organization (a global organization with 200,000 internal identities and 5 million external identities) was able to realize $9.2 million in benefits from retiring technical debt alone.

Our real-life customers say it best. One customer interviewed for the study shared:

“Radiant Logic has allowed us to eliminate old technology and tools and services that were costly to maintain, yet ineffective.”

-Director of IAM in the healthcare industry

Be the Final Girl: RadiantOne to the Rescue

RadiantOne enables organizations to eviscerate technical debt and start taking advantage of modern approaches and technologies—from advanced security frameworks like Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA), to standards-based protocols, and cloud and hybrid architectures.

There’s a ripple effect from upleveling your identity infrastructure—it bleeds into areas like operational efficiency, job satisfaction, and of course, improved security posture.

Get the Bats out of the Belfry: Reduce Identity Complexity and Redundancy

Legacy solutions are one problem–but the complex processes and integrations that have evolved over time as workarounds are a whole other bag of tricks. Gut them both with one fell swoop by streamlining the architecture.

As another customer shared with Forrester Consulting:

“With Radiant Logic we have been able to consolidate directories into a single platform, and we have been able to decommission identity silos and all the operations and the tech stack that we built to keep that old architecture up and running.”

-Principal IAM architect

Pivot your IT spend (and labor and other resources!) away from maintenance and support to more impactful, business-aligned projects like enhancing customer experience, boosting productivity, avoiding regulatory compliance fees, and so on.

Wrapped up in tech debt, immobilized by layers of dependencies and vendor lock-in? We’ll help you de-mummify.

Ready for the Sequel: Maintain Flexibility and Control

Today, do you know how much of your organization’s IT hours are spent trying to reduce technical debt? It’s probably too many, and for too little return. RadiantOne can accelerate the pace, whether in the context of a directory modernization project, cloud migration, or any other identity-driven initiative where flexibility is crucial.

RadiantOne helps IT be a partner to the business by enabling transformation at a faster clip and lower cost. Consolidating identity functions into a flexible platform lets you keep what you like, lose what you don’t, and turn your attention to higher-level projects.

A senior IAM leader in healthcare told Forrester: “We wanted to address technical debt. Ever since we moved our data into Radiant Logic and started using it as the authoritative data store we have been able to eliminate a lot of complexity and redundancy and avoid other technology renewals.”

Whatever tech debt looks like in your organization—a nest of Active Directories you can’t touch, custom databases containing bits and pieces of people (fragmented identities), evil twins (duplicate accounts), or extra cloud IAM services, RadiantOne can help. Kill it with fire! And by fire I mean the Identity Data Fabric approach.

Don’t Go In There! Don’t Go Up Those Stairs!

Whatever you do, don’t split up. Don’t try to go it alone: the DIY route just causes more delays, more headaches, and wasted time and resources as projects limp along or don’t succeed at all. Identity data management is done better with the right set of tools (chainsaw, ax, identity correlation) specialized for the job at hand.

If you want to drive a stake in the heart of tech debt, keep in mind that our composite organization reduced legacy infrastructure by $3 million in one year ALONE. It’s looking grim for that dug-in directory of yours.

Happy tech debt hunting, and Happy Halloween! For more, read our e-book of magic spells, or the full TEI of Radiant Logic, it’s a real… thriller.