Migration and consolidation initiatives have the primary goal of unifying identities. Whether the trigger is a merge, an acquisition, or implementing a new technology, they all require implementing new business roles logic, controls, security policies and entitlements for users accessing new platforms.

Data is the other core driver for migrations. It usually involves consolidation from various legacy sources into your new application repository, which is done through transformation and synchronization, or migration from old to new system, which is done through conversion and replication.

User experience – we measure success by impact to user experience and data integrity. Our specialists have a goal in making migrations a non-event for end users, ensuring continued productivity and collaboration.

Identity is the construct used to achieve both access and security goals. Understanding the approach for identity allows for the planning of correct end-state from the very beginning. Identity construct tells what is the approach to migrate existing accounts, create new ones, consolidate accounts together, and what are the processes and rules for how your organization governs identity. Security also fits here and that we pursue two objectives: take advantage of the change to tighten security and take all precautions against possible security incidents.

Integrations are secondary migration objectives of various criticality. One thing is known for sure; they are always part of a project and there is always at least one core integration to be performed. Most times integrations are what brings uniqueness to a project, as we may face legacy systems and lack of knowledge on how these legacy integrations were made.

The entire strategy being built has to fit the needs and meet the mandates. Strategy includes migration approach with timelines, impacts and process, while the approach is based on end-state requirements and what discoveries are made.

In simple words, identity consolidation is the process of merging multiple identity silos and data profiles into a single, unified platform that can provide user account management with permissions and authentication and can act as a single source of truth for broader initiatives like single sign-on and centralized access control.

Consolidation addresses several key scenarios covered by Locked ID Software extensive offering that is backed by the strongest in the industry palette of solutions and managed services. These scenarios are:

• Unifying and managing user identities from on premise identity silos like Active Directory, social platforms, disparate user accounts and other under Microsoft’s cloud ecosystem, particularly leveraging Azure AD (Entra ID) to centralize authentication, access control, and management for various users, applications and devices.

• Moving and consolidating user accounts between cloud tenants which is usually triggered by mergers and acquisitions. Such initiatives require to integrate and migrate users, groups and devices, together with associated workloads and configuration data.

• Retiring legacy collaboration systems are part of organizations modernizing their communication and collaboration infrastructure. Since unlike other platforms, these are usually proprietary technologies based on obsolete standards, migration requires specialized tools and certified resources that can achieve two objectives: converting source platform configurations to the new technology and transforming content into meaningful output that makes sense to your Microsoft applications.

In all three described scenarios, coexistence plays a major role. Tenant consolidations are disruptive to organizations and need 100% coexistence through the migration project, since any application, data or access unavailability can have critical effect on business continuity. Sometimes, coexistence and continuous availability of application data can only be achieved by enrolling specialized solutions that are dedicated to migrating a specific directory, application or collaboration suite.

Identity migration and consolidation projects are always unique challenges for an organization that are exceptions to day-to-day operations and require trusted expertise to achieve success. While the end goals are to simplify identity management, enhance security, and improve the user experience by enabling unified single sign on, modern authentication and seamless integration with applications and technologies of newer generation, having the right partner onboarded will make the difference between success and failure achieving these goals.

Migration projects are great opportunities for application modernization. More than often organizations find themselves in position to support legacy applications that cannot be integrated with modern identity architectures. Such applications pose compliance and security risks, and are a constant burden to IT.

Especially in case of merges and acquisitions, legacy applications will continue to coexist with new technologies.

This is where Locked ID Software expertise comes into play. Our specialists are able to deploy a full stack of migration technologies that will address the entire scope of transformation, sometimes using tools that are unique in the industry, to achieve a positive impact on user experience.

To achieve a successful application migration project, the in-place strategy will need to ensure:

• Platform interoperability from one technology to another, or from old to new version;

• Maintain an accurate, real-time copy of production data by maintaining source and target in sync through the entire synchronization or transformation timeframe, while ensuring no data is lost in transit;

• Rollback capabilities for the unfortunate case when process needs to be reverted;

• Consistent cutover when migration is completed, and all users operate in the new environment.

Companies migrating applications need to have the peace of mind their data will be synchronized between the two applications, considering each application may have a unique data model.