One Identity Active Roles Reviews

1. It is mainly for delegation of permissions inside the domains for large companies.
2. It is for provisioning and deprovisioning users in the Active Directory (AD) and their licenses in Office 365.

We are working with a customer now who is having some problems with their permissions and delegations, because a lot of users have to do administration activities in the Active Directory. Now, they have been given domain administrators. However, with this solution, they are skipping all the domain administrators and keeping the normal users, which is fantastic for them because some of the personnel are basic IT technicians without the knowledge of AD advance features. Our customers were afraid of errors being caused by these people, so they can avoid these errors in the new environment.

This solution eliminated tedious IT tasks with provisioning. We have a lot of customers who prefill, or have only a list of values, for some fields.

The delegation feature is really important. It is one of the most valuable features that our customers appreciate about the solution. 

The provisioning and deprovisioning saves a lot of time and skips a lot of errors.

For the AD management feature, it is perfect. It covers everything. 

For the AAD management feature, it needs to improve the objects that we can manage and the security. I know that they have everything in road map, so they probably will include everything in a year or a year and a half.

I would like them to support a cloud solution. This is important for us. They have it on their roadmap. For now, they only have basic options for cloud-delivered services. We are in the prospect of looking for a customer who wants a cloud-only solution, but will wait for the new features, which will probably be available in one year.

The should try to move everything to a web interface. More solutions are trying to use a web interface. 

They need batch processing, but that is in the road map, and that's okay. 

They need better language support. While they have a language pack, it's not always available at the same time as the product. Sometimes, when we install it in other countries, they don't have the language pack, then our customers complain about this.

It is pretty stable.

You can add more servers for some functionalities. For now, I haven't found any issues with the scalability, even with large organizations (more than 80,000 employees).

While I don't open many cases, when I do open one, normally the response is quick. They either give me a solution or put it in the queue to do it. So, for now, it is okay.

The initial setup is straightforward and easy: Install the product and connect the domains. The configuration can be complex or easy depending on the customer.

The solution has saved our customers time by automating tasks that could take from half an hour to 45 minutes.

Test it. Whenever you test it in your real environment, you normally want it. 

If you talk with an AD administrator about this solution and you display the features: How you save time, how you avoid errors, etc. It's a really good product. The main problem is getting companies to pay money for the product, but all AD administrators want to have this solution.

We use it to lock down the interface between helpdesks and Active Directory.

It's improved things because we don't have "cowboy changes" being made to AD without us knowing about it. People still have to do the things they need to do, but we can now make sure that they don't inadvertently do something they shouldn't.

It hasn't saved us time in terms of what needs to be done, but it has saved us time in terms of not having to go back and fix stuff when people have made mistakes.

It gives us attribute-level control and the AD management features work very well.

For what we use it for, there are no additional features it would need.

Most of the time it just works.

It works at the scale we use it at. I can't say whether it would work in much bigger enterprises or not.

I, personally, have never had cause to use technical support. My guys have interacted with them a few times and have been happy with the support they've received.

Previously, people were able to update AD directly. We have reduced that by pushing everything through Active Roles. Our decision to go with this solution was part of the need to lock things down, make things more secure.

We did the deployment ourselves.

My advice would be to certainly consider Active Roles and, depending on the size of the organization, consider integrating it with Starling as well.

I know the solution is extensible through cloud-delivered services but we don't use those currently.

I would rate Active Roles a nine out of ten, based on the convenience it's given us.

We primarily use it for delegation access permissions, to helpdesks for example. We use it to automate certain things, like onboarding new users, deprovisioning leaving users, or when we add somebody to a group it triggers some kind of automation workflow. Lastly, we use it to sanitize data entry, to make sure that the first letter of the street name is capitalized, certain zip codes are allowed, others aren't; it's a type of data control.

It helps mitigate risks. With traditional, native Active Directory delegation, it can become really messy, really fast. You lose oversight on who has access where. We are an acquisitions and mergers company so we let go of certain companies and we onboard new ones. With native delegating, we can lose track of who has access and to what. With Active Roles, we can always see who has access, what they can do, in a very granular way. A user can modify the street name, but can't modify the city, for example; or can modify the picture, but not the names. That granularity is not normally available.

It has eliminated a lot of tedious IT tasks, especially when people leave. There are ten or 15 scripted actions that Active Roles does, always the same way and at the same time. Before, there would literally be a list of things that the admin would have to do, like hide the mailbox, disable the user, remove the groups, etc. Also, the auditing history that it keeps is very handy for us. It gives us a change record of what's been done to a user, who did it, when they did it, and that really helps out.

And now that we are outsourcing a lot of activities, we're dealing with a changing audience. Tools like this make sure that they do everything in a structured manner, that everybody does the same thing at the same time.

It's valuable to us in that it resembles the native tools that most people have grown accustomed to. Most people come from another company where they may have not used Active Roles. Active Roles resembles traditional tools, such as from Microsoft. That is really good because it eases the way people to interact with the tool.

The AD and AAD management features of this solution are really good. They're better than the native tools. They offer added value by showing more fields such as password age and the statuses of some things that we normally wouldn't see. What I really like is the fact that we have the mailbox and the user information all on one screen. With native tools, you need two tools to show that information.

Active Roles allows policies and there are a lot of example policies that come with it. It has Access Templates and there are a lot of Access Template examples in it. It also has workflows and those are really powerful, but there are no built-in workflows. When it comes to them, it's empty. I would personally love for it to come with ten, 15, or 20 workflows where each achieves a certain task but that are not enabled. I could just look at how each is done, clone them, copy them, modify them the way I want them, and be good to go. Right now we have to invent things from scratch.

It's very stable. Even if components lose connectivity or the database dies, as soon as they come back up, it just reconnects and goes.

It covers everything we want. It's scalable. We can make it redundant, we can replicate databases. We don't use a lot of those features, but it's very scalable.

The reason we went with this solution - and it was ten or 15 years ago - was the Active Directory delegation. We could not allow everyone to have native access to our Active Directory. The delegation feature was really the trigger. In addition, the automation was attractive. There was so much room for human error that we wanted to script activities, rather than relying on the admin knowing what to do.

It requires a bit of getting used to, where you set what. But once you get the hang of it, it's really straightforward.

The ROI is in the mitigation of risks: The risk of leaving unauthorized access behind, the risk of having Active Directory pollution. With that comes risks of people getting access they shouldn't have. There is the risk of having multiple accounts for the same thing; that's the biggest part. There's no actual money there, but risk management is really what you pay for.

We considered using the Microsoft solution because it's free and built-in, and already there. That's what everybody does. But when you grow beyond a certain size, you find out that it just does not cut it anymore. 

We also considered using other tools, but at the time, Active Roles was very much alone in this world. I have to admit, now there are other vendors available, which I don't have any personal experience with, but on paper, they seem to do some of the same things. But at the time, there was simply nothing else that could even come close.

I would give this solution a nine out of ten. There's always room for improvement. With every product, nothing is completely done. But this product is definitely up there.

RBAC for AD and Exchange

Provisioning, Re-provisioning, De-provisioning and Undo-De-Provisioning of user accounts

User Self Service

Virtual AD firewall

• Heavily Automates - it will automate the entire provisioning, re-provisioning, de-provisioning and undo-de-provisioning tasks
• Complete Audit Trail - it gives an audit trail for each and every activity
• Increase in accountability – various tasks can be enabled for approval.
• Virtual Firewall against AD/Exchange - it helps protect Active Directory and Exchange exposure to administrators and engineers
• Escalations – it helps escalates tasks if not acted upon in a stipulated time frame
• Security –
  • it helps in increased security as every employee will have correct resource access depending upon the business policies
  • user account is disabled and user is removed from the security groups which prevent misuse of user credentials

• Role Based Access Control
• Provisioning, Re-provisioning, De-provisioning and Undo-De-provisioning policies
• Data validation policies
• Workflows
  • If Then Else statements
  • Approval Workflows
  • Schedule Workflows
  • Escalation
• Virtual Schema
• Virtual OU’s
• Web console with easy customization option
• Integration and data synchronization with SQL, Office 365, Lync etc.
• Event handlers

• Web console – it should have more customization options in terms of look and feel of the landing page
• Workflow policies – Additional policies for folder access provisioning
• Bring back attestation – Attestation feature is dropped from ARS. This should be brought back

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

It's good.

Technical Support:

It's good. In fact, the One Identity (Quest) support team has easy access to the One Identity (Quest) product developers. In case of any technical issues which has something to do with the product architecture or a bug, the support engineer brings in the developer in a remote session so that the developer understands the issue. The developer(s) then work on a patch to address the issue.

I did not use any other solution.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It's not at all complex.

Our company, Amal IT Solutions, is a One Identity (Quest) partner. Our consultancy has 10+ years of experience with this solution.

I won’t be able to provide ROI from commercial perspective, but from the below points one should be able to figure it out:

1. User provisioning/De-provisioning – this activity, which takes anywhere from one day to three or four days manually, is done in minutes without any IT resource intervention and so increases efficiency and productivity


2. Notifications – respective stake holders/business owners are notified immediately upon an activity performed, and no follow-up emails or phone calls required


3. Data consistency – it helps to maintain data consistency in AD which eliminates a data clean-up activity which IT department has to undertake regularly


4. Data synchronization – it synchronizes data between HR application and AD/Exchange or other applications and AD/Exchange relieving HR and other application owners from day to day tasks of co-ordination or creating/modifying/deleting application user accounts


5. Automation – Most of the IT tasks are automated which in turn reduces work load on IT department. IT resources could be better utilized for some other useful activities

It’s a gentleman’s agreement.

Licensing is based on Enabled User Accounts in AD. This should include user accounts, application accounts and service accounts.Temporary accounts could be excluded, but no one from vendors really challenge the user count which the customer provides. Some customer’s find the price bit on higher side but, for me, the price is competitive compared to other products with similar functionality and considering the ROI.

The product functionality does not cease if the customer exceeds the license count. The vendor does not want to force the customer to stop using the product if the license count increases. Instead, customers can buy additional licenses without hampering the day to day work.

We didn't evaluate other products.

This product has tremendous potential. It can be used to automate a lot of day to day activities. I always tell my customers, list down all your requirements, pain areas, and day to day tasks. Prioritize them, and use this tool to automate these tasks as per priority.

When a new employee is hired, we create a new Active Directory (AD) user in a related department (Organizational Unit) with a random generated password, then give that user some AD rights. Also, we create an exchange mail user for this user on cloud or on-prem and inform that user by sending a notification mail or SMS. We did similar things in other systems and did all the process manually before Active Roles. That means lots of workload and manual processes. Active Roles provided us to do all these operations automatically and reduced our workload very significantly.

• It provides automatic provisioning/update/deprovisioning workflows from a source system to a target system.
• It allows you to easily monitor all workflow processes.
• It has very powerful native policies and scripts, which allow you to create your own custom policies, scripts, and virtual attributes.
• In addition to using the console (MMC interface), it also gives you management from the web interface.

For ActiveRoles, it would be good if the product supports multi-scripting language. You can use only VBScript.

VB.net , C#, or Powershell scripting would be a good choice for the product.

No issues.

No issues.

Technical support replies really promptly. The support team is very experienced and focused on the product. On the other hand, there is a community portal and you can find every piece of knowledge on there.

We have not used any similar products before. We did all related operations manually.

It was very straightforward.

The licensing model is a simple user-based model, not that much complicated.

We evaluated and researched other options, such as NetIQ, FIM, Oracle, CA, IBM, and SailPoint.

However, Active Roles is most suitable for us.

It is very important to come together with system owners who will be integrated at the beginning of the project to clarify all the rules and determine the work to be done. Test environments of the systems to be integrated must be requested. Test environments are so necessary.

• Automation of manual identity management operations (provisioning and deprovisioning).
• Solving security and compliance issues is easy.
• Operational issues are much easier and more reliable with Quest ActiveRoles's directory layer and portal.

It provides automatic provisioning for many applications and systems, including in-house applications and cloud applications. Also, it offers a virtual directory structure and a new directory layer between users and physical directories. Management and monitoring become easier.

Scripting options in different languages.

Not yet.

No.

It is excellent. Quick and useful answers.

They also have a large community portal where you can find a lot of information.

I didn't use any other solution, but I evaluated many solutions.

It was simple. I didn't have a problem. It took half a day.

There is a simple user-based licensing model. Not complicated.

Yes. NetIQ, FIM, Oracle, CA, IBM, and SailPoint.

Choose your project team well. Remember that analysis of all processes is very important. Don't forget that testing is also very important after each development.