SolarWinds Access Rights Manager (ARM) vs. Fischer Identity as a Service

It [SolarWinds Access Rights Manager (ARM)] is well suited for small to medium sized companies who want to enhance and ease up their daily work. As well as it is suited for organized structures, it has its problems with very complex environments. For example, if you are working with direct and multiple permissions instead of having more granular group based permissions.

Incentivized

Fischer is well suited for the use case scenarios where an institution has not previously used any identity management and needs to quickly provide services to meet regulatory or other deadlines. It also works well when you can implement in smaller batches of user accounts and grow over time. We have found it less appropriate for cases where we have needed to set up on-off temporary or special access. Fischer has worked with us on out-of-band provisioning but we had to pay for extra Fischer professional services to make that work.

Incentivized

• SolarWinds Access Rights Manager is easy to set up and configure. We had the first report generated in a few hours.
• The automated feature for the reports is great. We just set it and forget it and now the reports get emailed on schedule.

Incentivized

• Integration with ERP
• Integration with Account Directory
• Integration with Office 365
• Password Reset Portal

Incentivized

• Licensing model when we changed over to SolarWinds was [I feel] a nightmare. It needs to be more streamlined and SolarWinds needs to understand what their customers require. When we changed over to SolarWinds we found it very hard to get answers to what modules we were still licensed for.
• Our current system is not functioning. We can't login to the application with the accounts we created that were working. The error that appears doesn't help to resolve it. So at present we just renewed licenses for this year and we can't use the system.

Incentivized

• Reducing the frequency (twice a month) of scheduled outages. But I believe they are making progress toward developing a more robust cloud infrastructure that will eliminate the need for such frequent downtimes.
• There are some less than intuitive administration tools, which could be improved. Fisher is always willing to help us when we don't understand the proper way to configure using the tools.
• I would like a streamlined way to move changes from our test environment into our production (live) environment instead of having to duplicate the effort.

Incentivized

It is in place and working. No time or money to consider anything else.

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End user experience is much better than administration

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On occasion the server will need to be restarted to get things running again

Incentivized

Satisfactory performance

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Very slow response times and sometimes I found the solution and ended up sharing it with support

Incentivized

It was my first exposure to this type of product and I wasn’t given the time to figure out how best to implement it. I would say get a plan together of what you are tying to accomplish first

Incentivized

I found the installation and configuration to be much easier and more straightforward. What also assisted in the decision to go with Access Rights Manager, was the fact we already made use of Solarwinds products. Knowing from previous experiences with their support staff, meant we knew how great their after-hours support was whenever we had any technical issues with the platform. We felt it would be better to keep it all under one roof so to speak

Incentivized

It does deliver as advertised, provided you do your homework and understand the expected outcome before going live. Poor planning can turn the project into a nightmare. It can save the company a good deal of man hours and money by bringing about identity management automation, a self-service portal, and customizable email notifications for all of the identity owners and other stakeholders. For example, you can inform your HR team upon successful account creation and disablement. You can proactively reach out to users informing them about their account extirpation status, etc.

Incentivized

No experience with this

Incentivized

• Team leads recieve automated reports of permissions within their team, and it allows them to proactively audit their team members
• Security specialists have really clear dashboards to audit individuals
• We can be sure we never leave a permission open after a person leaves

Incentivized

• Fischer has had a positive impact by providing self-serve identity and password management tools that our constituents can use at their convience, not tied to our operational hours.
• Fisher Identity as a Service has been a significant cost, but it is anticipated that it saves our students significant time and effort that they can better dedicate to their academic pursuits.
• Negative initial reaction--as this was a new way of doing things, there was a period of confusion among our college constituent that required additional communication and instruction

Incentivized