Fischer Identity 6.1 Controls Business Operations – Not Just Security

March 7, 2018 - Naples, FL – Fischer International Identity unveiled the latest release of their Identity Governance and Administration suite that places heavy emphasis on "Control." Fischer believes that Identity offers organizations ultimate control over the entirety of their organization, and should not focus solely on security.

"Security happens organically if you deploy the right IGA & Access Management product suite" says Dan Dagnall, COO of Fischer Identity. "We are extremely excited about our 6.1 release, as it creates a synergy across the entire IGA stack by offering the proper mix required to secure an organization, and the necessary functionality and scalability to easily automate IGA across the enterprise. The result is control – control of business processes speed, security, costs, and efficiency." Dagnall asserts that mature Identity products must provide Granular Security, Streamlined Functionality and Enhanced Governance that are predictable, affordable and right-sized for any organization. "That is exactly what we've accomplished with version 6.1."

Granular Security Enhancements
Fischer now offers a native key management feature, empowering organizations to review keys used for their organization or globally within the product. It provides transparency on what is being encrypted, by which algorithm, and how long that key has been in use. It also empowers Administrators with the ability to rotate a key which will, in effect, create a new key and re-encrypt every existing value with the new key. Also new is manageable key-pairs used for transmitting sensitive data over the wire. The asymmetric encryption for sensitive data provides an extra layer of security and does not interfere with SSL nor does it remove the need for SSL. And for ultimate protection, native key expiry policies have been introduced that will automatically detect stale keys and immediately trigger a rotation if an administrator has forgotten to rotate or if a key has been in use for too long.

Following the NIST standards, Fischer Identity 6.1 introduces new algorithms for encryption. "We are also proud to further align our features to match best practices and recommendations from organizations such as NIST to ensure that our current and future customers are able to rely upon the hardened security best practices that our industry has adopted through the years." For symmetric encryption (used for data at rest), Fischer defaults to AES-256 and introduced expanded support for AES-192 and AES-128. For asymmetric encryption, RSA 2048 is included by default and adds RSA 1024. The product's hashing algorithms have also been upgraded to the latest and greatest available in the market.

Streamlined Functionality
Fischer continues to lead the market with a WYSIWYG approach to IGA & Access Management, a competitive differentiator for both Fischer and their customers. "In this release, we've expanded our customer's ability to quickly migrate solutions between environments, literally with the click of a button. We've been able to migrate Fischer on-premises deployments to our Identity as a Service® cloud in a matter of a weekend" Dagnall boasts.

Fischer also expanded the User Match capabilities to help organizations capture duplicate identities BEFORE they are created.

6.1 brings with it native abilities to execute automated processes "onSubmit", without writing a single line of JavaScript code, or XHTML changes to call a custom process. "Post processing is essential and forms-based interfaces often require source code to properly execute a post process. Organizations can now leverage Fischer's well known point-and-click approach to execute business processes as a result of a user submitting a form. While this may seem like a small change, tell that to those tasked with upgrading our competitors' solutions. This small evolution in our product offers maximum scalability to our customers."

Fischer has also expanded support and integration with Duo Security.

Enhanced Governance
Fischer Identity 6.1 brings governance to the forefront by offering more granular options than in previous releases. Recertification jobs can now be executed faster and the attestation process has been improved to include the proper stakeholders, putting Fischer's latest release of re-certification and attestation on par with the leaders in the market. "With our focus on provisioning and our long history and depth of capabilities relating to automation and fulfilment, refactoring certification to match how the feature has come to be used by most organizations was not difficult for us at all. We feel our investment in provisioning over the years puts us light years ahead of our competition when it comes to assuring the accuracy of the data used for attestation and certification."

Fischer also expanded their customer's ability to store useful attributes about each of their unique identity types. "Fischer understands that not every type of user fits into a single identity and it is very important that each organization's own identity types are able to be properly represented. More importantly, the distinct attributes about the different identities must be available to the Identity solution so they can be controlled within the context the customer's business needs. For example, Travelling Nurses need access quickly to deliver services to in-home care patients, while Visiting Faculty members need access quickly to sponsored university accounts. These are two entirely different scenarios that demonstrate why your IGA vendor's data model must be able to grow with your business and provide the right-sized enforcement for each and every different persona your organization must secure and control. 6.1 gets it done for you and is purpose-built to grow with your business."

Dagnall concluded that "Niche governance vendors were definitely necessary to help our industry point itself towards the future, and that future is one where cyber security, access management, authentication, authorization and provisioning are bundled together where Identity is the ultimate authority. I am excited to report Fischer International Identity is well down this path and we are excited for our next major release which will continue to provide best of breed features, and visionary approaches to solving your Identity, Governance & Access Management needs."

Additional Platform Support
In addition to Fischer's support of customer on-premises, private cloud, or Fischer IaaS® environments, Fischer Identity Version 6.1 is now also available for Amazon Web Services environments, combining the industry-leading IGA solution with the scalable and services-rich AWS platform. Support for Amazon Aurora and AWS APIs is included.

About Fischer International Identity
The Fischer International Identity mission is simple: "Your Success." From how we've engineered our identity & access management and governance software, and how our implementation methodology eliminates unnecessary overhead and cost, to our investment in our customers by providing low cost and in many cases no-cost feature enhancements, our solutions make IAM work for your organization - both technically and financially. We never stop innovating. We never stop evolving our product and our methodology. We are never satisfied because we know we can continue to make IAM and IGA easier to consume and deploy.