C-HIT: Demystifying the Complexities of Identity Management

What is the biggest identity and access management challenge? Is it provisioning and de-provisioning users, managing passwords, controlling access, or fulfilling compliance needs across the organization? “Maybe, it is all of the above, and more,” exclaims Kovilvenni Ramaswamy (Ram), chief innovation officer of C-HIT— an IT company specializing in identity and access management for federal, state, and local organizations. He goes on to explain that these challenges are an ongoing burden for most of the identity management solution providers as they are not able to strike at the core of the problems. Hence, they end up implementing a solution that is fairly complicated, costly, and not user-friendly. Moreover, the companies employ a “one size fits all” approach, which fails to remediate all the customer pain points.“The real issue is not about finding an apt solution but the right approach,” Ram reveals. This is where C-HIT imprints its distinctiveness in the industry. “Our motto is: simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” says Ram. C-HIT minutely observes and notes every key detail of an organization’s workflow to orchestrate the simplest, yet the most potent identity and access management solution.

When it comes to employing an efficient identity management system for federal agencies, another critical challenge that C-HIT stumbles upon is scalability. More often than not, different divisions of a government agency would utilize a solution that was designed in-house, with no interoperability between other departments of the organization. This fragmented nature of the solution adds to the mismanagement and makes it very difficult to scale. C-HIT efficiently modernizes this legacy approach and coalesces multiple divisions to ensure better collaboration between the teams, with strong identity proofing and authentication controls. Explaining this through a case in point, Ram mentions that they once helped a large consumer-facing organization integrate millions of users— internal as well as external partner users—on an identity management system, thereby removing all silos and simplifying the approach to identity management.

“However, implementing a foolproof identity management solution only solves half of the equation,” says Ram. That is where C-HIT goes a step further and offers identity governance and administration (IGA) solutions.