Introduction
Traditionally, enterprises have a centralized IT department responsible for all
things related to IT. this works reasonably well but doesn’t tend to scale efficiently.
General IT administration functions are often related to one or more of the following
key areas:
- Identity management – creating/deleting/updating user accounts
- Access control – granting/denying users access to various resource or applications
- Application related updates – configuration etc.
So what’s the problem?
Although these tasks are fairly menial in nature, they also require accounts (or
logins) with high administrative permissions, consequently often only highly skilled
(and trusted) IT staff are granted such rights. The result: highly paid, highly
skilled staff wasting their time on large volumes of menial tasks.
It’s not great for the end-user either, all they want is something trivial like
access to an application or a password reset, yet they have to phone a helpdesk
and possibly wait several hours before they get what they need to do their job.
Ultimately this has a number of unwanted results – such as:
- A large IT department – resulting in higher costs
- Skilled IT staff, wasting time performing menial tasks
- Lack of focus on strategic IT direction – too burdened with day to day tasks
- IT department gets slated by all users for slow turnaround times.
Delegated Administration empowers trusted end-users to serve themselves without
compromising security. It allows non-technical staff to perform highly technical
tasks, yet without needing any knowledge or specific system wide permissions.
The Cortex system is designed to allow the delegation of as much or as little responsibility
as required to anyone within an organization. A common example would be to enable
an office or team administrator can now be delegated responsibility to create new
users, add mailboxes, manage distribution lists, grant permissions to network shares
or even publish applications through Citrix or terminal services.
Cortex has been designed to be easy to use, functionality is hidden unless required,
allowing the simplest interface possible for each individual user. Generally most
users can understand the system intuitively without the need for extensive training.
The Cortex provisioning system is designed to enable the delivery of hosted services.
It is used by internet service providers to deliver business applications seamlessly
to customers. The hosted services model allows part of the IT administrative function
to be outsourced, for smaller businesses Cortex enables IT to comprehensively be
outsourced while gaining increased efficiency in support turnaround.
Ensuring security is of paramount importance in a delegated administration system;
unlike other systems users have no physical permissions in the LDAP repository.
Cortex virtualizes the user’s permissions providing an additional level of security.
All provisioning processes are completed by a higher privileged account operating
on a secured provisioning server.
Wikipedia definition of delegated administration