3 Identity Tips for Creative Collaboration

It's an exciting time to be in the media business. With a screen in every pocket the way we interact with and experience media is changing rapidly. Content continues to be king, but the upheaval in media distribution is profoundly changing the business of media. Media companies are evolving both in how they go to market and how they produce content. Today's post focuses on the role of identity in enabling creative collaboration in this rapidly changing industry.

As media production has become digital, it has become more dynamic and fluid than ever. Teams of specialists distributed all over the world are assembled virtually overnight for projects that can last between days and years. This new way of working creates new challenges for IT. How do you ensure that the team has the tools it needs? How do you on-board team members and off-board team members quickly and efficiently? How do you ensure the security of media assets with a workforce that is constantly in transition? How do you manage licensing and procurement?

While the solutions to these challenges are likely to fill a career, here are three identity tips for delivering efficient and secure digital collaboration:

• First, unify identity. If you're like most companies, you have a fragmentation problem where partners must use several separate accounts across applications or portals to do their work. Each separate identity means a separate password to manage, and a separate user lifecycle to administer. Unifying identity management has a number of important benefits. It makes sign in simple for the user, it makes managing the identity much more efficient, and it gives complete visibility into access rights instantaneously.
• Second, automate account provisioning. Given the short duration of production engagements you'll want to do anything you can to get people on-boarded and productive as quickly as possible. How much could you save if every person had access to the tools they need on the very first day? This has the added benefit of allowing rapid deprovisioning as well. When it's time for partners to roll off a project you can save some manual operations and reduce the risk of lingering access rights by automatically deprovisioning access.
• Finally, delegate administration. One of the biggest challenges to securing digital collaboration is the risk of lingering access privileges for people whose status you may not know right away. When partnering with a larger organization it's hard to know the standing of each contributor without implementing some form of process. One of the most efficient ways to address this issue is by enlisting the partner organization to manage their own people as they are in the best position to know each person's standing. When a person leaves a project, the partner organization deactivates the user for you.

We hope these pointers spur some new ideas for how to drive new efficiencies and enable secure collaboration for your team.

Watch this video to learn about how we're helping 20th Century Fox to roll out the red carpet for production partners.