Connect Everything Identity with Connector Studio

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about connectors and how our core identity applications get the information they need. It seems like loading the data has always been a problem, but we’re all kind of resigned to the way it is. So, I’ve been focusing on how Readibots connects to those applications- thinking about it, and discussing it with folks and looking at the challenges when it comes to getting application data into our hands.

Connector Challenges

 It reminds me a lot of the public transit system here in Calgary. We’ve got one long LRT (light rail transit) line that runs down the middle of the city, and the buses run to/from the LRT. The idea being that you bus to the LRT, you take the LRT somewhere, and then you bus from the LRT to wherever you want to go. This is the kind of thing that sounds ok in practice, but the reality is pretty bad.

The buses to the LRT run infrequently. The buses from the LRT to wherever you want to go are the same. The LRT itself is busy and while it’s well-maintained and relatively cheap, it still has issues and delays in getting you where you need to be. So, in the winter you’re waiting in -15C weather for the bus to come, then you wait at the LRT station, then you wait to get the bus to where you want to go. The outcome is cheap but slow, which often means it’s not very useful. It could be better, and there are plenty of examples of ways to improve – London, Amsterdam, and Sydney all come to mind.

Cheap and slow also seems to be the way for connectors now. If you want to do it “on the cheap” – i.e. without investing in a technology to improve your outcomes, it takes a long time and is often very manual. In a business context, however, that just makes them expensive again. Whether you do it in-house slowly or pay contractors to do it slowly, the total cost to get connected is high. And often what you get is fragile and needs updates and monitoring to keep them going because you take short-cuts to get the job done, so the total cost climbs even higher.

Why do we continue the status quo?  Our identity applications can’t provide for all the unique and one-off connectors that are needed. Thos applications are focused on the 80/20 rule providing connectors for the most common business applications.

Connector Cost

So how do we fix the connector challenge? Well, it starts by figuring out where the money goes.

First, there’s the expertise needed to write the connector. You’re paying developer wages to build something bespoke – not cheap. There’s also expertise on the system you’re connecting to (your IGA platform, SaaS platform, MFA platform, what have you).

Once you’ve got the basic connection built, there’s work to reformat and clean up the data to match your existing data. More developer time.

To build a connector, the developer needs to understand the business application and the identity application, at least well enough to get the bits they need. More time.

The connector system needs to be built in a robust way – logging, monitoring, throttling, alerting. All of this needs to be wired into existing frameworks. You don’t have a connector alerting (or logging or monitoring) framework? Well, better build one of those too. More time.

And there’s more to it than this. What it comes down to is that we need a better way to build these connectors, and we want to build as little ourselves as possible.

Connector Studio: Remove the Complexity

Enter the new Readibots Connector Studio. Full disclosure: one of the reasons I’ve been thinking about this so much is because we wanted to build a framework people will actually use, one that delivers on a promise of connectivity at a much reduced cost and the one we’ve built is pretty fantastic.

First, no more developers needed – it’s all in PowerShell with a UI. Your IT staff – the ones who are already at least partial experts in these apps – can write these themselves through the UI with access to the underlying PowerShell for more complicated scenarios, or at least provide their expertise in a useable, less expensive way.  PowerShell provides the ability out of the box to connect to a wide range of data sources (e.g. databases, web services, files, etc.).  Access to the PowerShell allows you to clean up the data during the connector process.

It’s built on Readibots Bot Studio, which means it has built-in monitoring, compliance reporting, logging, throttling, queueing, alerting, and just about everything you could already want.

The platform already has the components needed to reach the cloud, on-prem, through firewalls, and other goodies too – the Connector Studio puts the tools you need to get connected right into your hands so you can get the data you need in AAA – automated, auditable, awesome.

So, while I don’t think Calgary is going to change the way it’s going to do public transit anytime soon, I do see changes to our identity connectors that are going to make us more connected, more automated, and more secure. I’ll take it.