When was the last time you had a great application access experience? Was it just now when you picked up your smartphone and facial recognition immediately unlocked it? Or maybe first thing this morning when facial recognition didn’t quite recognize you with a pillow stuck to your face, so it asked for a PIN just to make sure—which secretly you were happy about (just me?). That experience is one of the reasons you chose your device and one of the reasons you continue to use it.
Increasingly, users are applying this same experience logic to their digital work environment. They want simple access to potentially confidential information. Users are constantly evaluating the access experience—how long, how distracting, how obtrusive. And it can make the difference between a happy, efficient and effective worker or an annoyed, frustrated, searching-for-a-new-job-with-an-employer-who-does-tech-better <breathe> employee.
Workspace ONE Access Improves User Access Experience
Fortunately, IT departments are getting new tools they can use to make the intersection of security and experience a happier place for employees while maintaining control of data. It’s not just the user’s identity that can be the key; we can combine identity with device information, compliance information, network or location information, and pooled information from other security sources to better enable and secure access.
For this reason, VMware will rename VMware Identity Manager to VMware Intersection of Security and Experience™.
OK, not really—but maybe retweet if for just a second you went along with it!
VMware Identity Manager is now Workspace ONE® Access™.
Workspace ONE Access Evolves User Access
VMware Identity Manager has long been a key aspect of the Workspace ONE solution, initially providing the common bridge between the desktop and mobile worlds. As the ability to combine information to make a more intelligent access decision developed, Workspace ONE also added integration with other identity providers (IDPs) and announced the Trust Network. Last year, VMware introduced a partnership with Okta that would combine the strengths of Okta’s best-in-class identity management, including user lifecycle management and Okta’s Integration network of over 5,500 pre-integrated apps for SSO, with the best-in-class Workspace ONE UEM solution that gives unique device information across multiple platforms and remediation capabilities to enforce a zero trust approach. Following this, we heard from customers that the term “Identity” was becoming confusing, often peaking the interest of the security team who may have Okta or other identity provider projects ongoing.
The Workspace ONE Access naming is intended to clear up this confusion and evolve the access concept beyond just the user’s identity. Workspace ONE Access is not positioned as an IDP but as a broker between an organization’s other identity providers and stores, helping to accelerate the deployment of SaaS, web, mobile, and legacy applications to all users. The role of Workspace ONE Access is to combine input from Workspace ONE UEM and Workspace ONE Intelligence with an organization’s access policy information to enforce a risk-based conditional access approach that is consumer-simple, yet enterprise-secure.
You can find more information on Workspace ONE and Workspace ONE Access here, read what Brian Madden thinks of this name change here.
