VMWare Identity Manager is great for Enterprise Remote Data and Application Delivery
March 29, 2017
VMWare Identity Manager is great for Enterprise Remote Data and Application Delivery
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with VMware Identity Manager
We use VMWare Identity manager (Workspace One) to provide remote access to university applications and data. We replaced several older systems with this product and consolidated several access methods (that used to vary depending on who you were and what you were doing) into one single place to go for access. We replaced a Citrix farm form application delivery, and various VPN/Remote Desktop and WebDAV based solutions for remote access to data.
- It provides an "SSO" type experience for access to applications and data. Users sign in to one "portal" and then have access to whatever university systems they need to do their job.
- It greatly simplifies securing these types of access. Firewall rulesets can be made much simpler and easier to manage, as well.
- There is not a ton of look/feel customization for VMWare Identity manager. We have had some complaints about the icons for the delivered applications, and it's very difficult to set up custom icons.
- Integrating Identity Manager with our enterprise authentication solution, which is based on AD FS was not immediately intuitive or easy to do. It was possible, but it took some work.
- Integrating Identity Manager with VMWare's own TrueSSO product (to allow certificate based authentication to work with MFA) was not intuitive and took some support calls.
- We were able to replace several products from different companies with a single one. IDM replaced a Citrix farm as well as various VPN solutions.
- Identity Manager has had a positive impact on our workload on our IT and Security engineers, as well as our desktop support group. We are now able to manage one location for application delivery instead of many, and security and other troubleshooting is much simplified, which means a lighter workload for those groups.
We also examined several other options, particularly Lenovo Unified Workspace. The Lenovo product had some advantages over the VMWare product, particularly in the areas of customization of the look / feel and user experience. However, we have been a longtime VMWare customer, and we have VMWare VDI and other product implementations in place now that paired very well with the VMWare product.