Legacy Platform Replacement

Go for a modern and standardized solution

Many organizations have developed their own platform to enable their services digitally to their customers. This means that they have to develop and maintain this solution, both today and in the future. This can be a challenge for a company of any size, since this requires not only expertise on the services that are implemented today, but also on the features that companies would want to deploy later. TrustBuilder provides a standardized and modern CIAM platform that takes away this complexity, allowing organizations to focus on their core business. Thanks to its open architecture, TrustBuilder can connect to any application, be it standards-based or based on proprietary protocols.

Build vs Buy

Most of the organizations have a way of offering their services digitally. During the initial development of these services, organizations have to decide whether they will build this (partially) themselves, or rely on third parties to provide them with the necessary building blocks.

Setting up such a new delivery channel can be quite a big cost. To save money, many companies decide to build some or most of the components related to this CIAM platform themselves. The organization is solely responsible for the development and maintenance of the platform. It also serves as the first line of response when something goes wrong, or when a customer has an issue while using the platform.

The components that are part of the platform need to be maintained and updated. This can be a huge challenge for an organization of any size. They constantly need people with a narrow but experienced skill set to be able to keep it up and running.

IAM becomes the bottleneck of innovation

A legacy, in-house developed platform is usually created with a certain scope and set of features that were needed at the time of development. As needs change, the platform will need to change as well and needs to be redeveloped. This can become a huge bottleneck, taking both time and money. Especially in today’s world, where new services and integration patterns are continually released.

In that case, the in-house CIAM prevents agility and swift rollout of new and modern services, creating a bottleneck for the whole organization. A more scalable approach is needed.

A modern CIAM platform is designed to be able to respond to these needs by standardizing integrations and providing a catalogue of predefined services as part of the platform. This makes adding new services, or changing current ones, much easier and user-friendly for the administrators.

Standardizing CIAM

Some organizations might still prefer to build a CIAM platform themselves, because they need to support other legacy systems. Being able to respond to new technology to support new cloud services is one thing, but a modern CIAM platform also needs to support legacy and non-standard integrations and applications.

The HR- and Banking industries are prime examples. These organizations rely on a complex infrastructure to provide all the services to their customers. These infrastructures are, in most cases, quite old and very hard to replace with a modern alternative. Integrating with these complex environments is therefore a challenge when you want to add additional services.

HR use case

Over the years, the HR landscape and technologies have changed dramatically. Organizations provide more than basic payroll–related services and start focusing on building a complete ecosystem to create a complete offering for their customers. To enable these ecosystems, HR organizations need to integrate with 3rd parties and enable these to use the payroll engine and access customer information. Most of the legacy platforms are not equipped to quickly adopt new technologies, making the rollout of new applications a bottleneck for the whole organization. A modern CIAM platform like TrustBuilder is the right foundation to both connect new applications and services, and integrate legacy applications and platforms.

How TrustBuilder deals with legacy

While many IAM platforms limit themselves to supporting connections to standards such as SAML, OAuth or Open ID Connect, TrustBuilder was built as an inherently open platform, that allows connections with any other application. It goes without saying that TrustBuilder supports all existing standards, but companies that deal with legacy applications can also use custom connections to open up these applications. Thanks to our support for Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC), we offer fine-grained security, allowing users access only to those applications they have privileges for. Authentication policies can be set up using our Workflow Engine.

By using TrustBuilder, organizations offer themselves the flexibility to add both existing legacy applications and new, standard applications to their architecture. As our customer SD Worx testifies: “The flexibility of TrustBuilder is a major bonus for us. It supports not only standard protocols, but proprietary protocols too. That is rare in other tools, which are sometimes SAML-only, and allow no editing. We can authenticate all our applications, even the legacy ones.”