SPHERE Technology Solutions
Simplifying IAM with Automated Reporting and Remediation

As the President and Founder of SPHERE Technology Solutions, Rita Gurevich observes a constant stream of challenges in the Identity and Access Management (IAM) space. When it comes to IAM, organizations need to have a clear understanding of every distributed system, platform, and application and how each business user manages the entitlements. The most significant component is the ability to present compelling and meaningful information to business users. This requires the back-end systems to be able to present clear data. “If we are not collecting the right information from the source system, not doing the right analytics and business intelligence on the back-end where we position the data and show it to business users; it is not going to give any benefits.” This is one of the most significant challenges in the industry currently. Turning this market challenge into an opportunity, SPHERE Technology Solutions offers its solution to clean the technical data from the source systems and translate it into information that is easily understood by the business community and can be assimilated to the systems that need it.

Drawing from its rich experience of helping clients solve the challenges with unstructured data in its initial years, the company has come a long way today gaining immense knowledge of metadata, its usage, and significance. “We recognized that the methodology that we implied for unstructured data also worked well with identity management. That is when SPHERE came to play as we started automating all the risk-based reporting providing the visibility into the identities and what they have access to,” says Rita.

As essential components of the SPHERE’s solution, connectors are designed to pull information from various sources such as Active Directory, databases and applications into the SPHERE engine that further normalizes and analyzes the data. This analyzed data is then presented in SPHEREboard that highlights the important information needed to make critical decisions. It offers various modules for reporting such as SPHEREboard for Unstructured Data Management, SPHEREboard for Privileged Access Management and SPHEREboard for Microsoft Exchange. From reporting to remediation, clients can switch modes that will show all the issues to fix along with the workflows and SPHERE’s virtual worker carries out the corrective actions. SPHERE helps clean up all the information from the back-end systems allowing clients to perform different workflows from an identity, governance, and access management perspective.

The main take away is the brain of the operation— the SPHEREengine that essentially organizes the connectors, the workers, the schedulers, the different modules to provide the risk-based reporting and remediation

Interestingly, the company’s identity management solution gives the ability to customize specific steps such as reaching out to business owners or viewing the business information. “The main take away is the brain of the operation—the SPHEREengine that essentially organizes the connectors, the workers, the schedulers, the different modules to provide the risk-based reporting and remediation,” says Rita.

SPHERE Technology Solutions have helped numerous clients overcome the challenge associated with managing privileged access. “Because privileged accounts have powers to the company’s most important assets, any breach in those accounts will lead to huge losses.” The company assists clients in collecting information about their privileged accounts, their owners and identifying areas that fall short of policy administration. SPHERE provides all the visibility required along with remediation processes. For instance, if there are privileged accounts on servers that should not have that level of access, the company will implement the required workflows to have those accounts reviewed and removed if deemed necessary.

Moving forward, the company is working towards leveraging the benefits of artificial intelligence and transforming SPHEREengine into SPHEREai that will use machine learning and predictive analytics to remediate issues automatically. “By continuously innovating and advancing our solution, we are enabling more clients to fix their problems. Our goal is to deliver solutions to create impactful changes in the IAM workflows including unstructured data identities and privileged accounts,” concludes Rita.