No-Code IAM: What Is It and Why Do You Need It?

No-Code IAM combines identity and access management, the central and automated administration of digital identities, with the no-code software model. By providing templates, plugins and visual interfaces, no-code IAM can be rapidly deployed and requires very little programming knowledge to operate.

This approach allows small and mid-sized organizations to use no-code IAM effectively even with limited IT staff and resources – unlike traditional identity and access management platforms, which demand a lot of time, effort and custom programming to implement.

The name “no-code” is a bit misleading: Of course no- and low-code tools still rely on code to function and produce the results you want. The difference is that you don’t have to write any code yourself.

Instead, you use the GUI, visual editors and on-screen menus to adjust the platform to your needs. In the case of no-code IAM, this means organizations can:

So, no-code IAM can be deployed, configured and operated without the need to write your own scripts, routines or tweaks. Why is that a big deal? I mean, how much programming does it take to get a traditional identity and access management system up and running? This may surprise you if you’ve never deployed an IAM platform before, but it takes a lot of programming.

Let’s provide a little context. Identity and access management helps you manage users and permission across various apps and services in your IT environment: Your Active Directory, Azure AD, cloud services like Teams, OneDrive and Sharepoint and different business apps like SAP ERP. In order to manage accounts in all these systems, you need to connect your IAM to them.

So you would expect IAM providers to make their solution easy to integrate, but the reality is that these platforms offer no out-of-the-box support for key systems. Instead, they provide a bare-bones interface in the form of a basic API, but require you to create workflows, data imports and processes to make them work together. In other words, an IAM solution might speak the same language as another app, but it’s up to you to make them talk to each other.

This requires developing, testing and implementing custom scripts and routines for each of the potentially dozens of systems you may want to manage through your IAM platform – a huge level of effort! Implementing a conventional IAM solution often turns into a multi-year project for this very reason. And don’t think that this is just a one-time issue: Since IT environments are always shifting and evolving, you will have to make frequent updates and adjustments or integrate new applications from scratch.

Aside from saving time and money through its rapid deployment and easy maintenance, there is another major advantage to no-code IAM: It requires less time, less effort and fewer people to make work.

Think about it: Between strict new laws and the continuing increase in cyberattacks, organizations depend on identity and access management (among other security solutions) to protect their network from harm. At the same time, many countries around the world – from the US to the UK and the European Union – face an ongoing IT skills shortage. Finding suitable candidates for IT positions can be difficult to impossible. So organizations need to find a way to do more with less.

The answer is automation. By automating routine tasks like account provisioning and permission management, your IT staff can focus on more important, high-level projects. The problem is: If you’re already short-staffed, you can’t afford to spend multiple years setting up an automated IAM system. No-code identity and access management helps you free up your IT staff in a fraction of the time, while helping you meet your security and compliance goals.

There many IAM solutions on the market, including a number of products that advertise some low-code/no-code functionality, like visual editors or a small set of pre-configured interfaces. However, tenfold is the only top to bottom no-code IAM platform out there. Every feature, every interface and every workflow can be fully configured through our user-friendly UI. We still give organizations the option to incorporate their own code to allow for additional customization, but it is just that: An option.

If you’re worried that going no-code means losing out on important features, let us put your mind at ease: tenfold is a full-scale IAM solution that allows you to automate user and permission management across local, cloud and hybrid systems, track and manage access to unstructured data, compile clear and concise reports, conduct regular access audits and more. We’d be happy to introduce you to the full potential of tenfold‘s powerful and easy-to-use platform through a free trial or a live demo with one of our experts. Alternatively, download our IAM comparison white paper to see how tenfold stacks up to other identity and access management products.