Has your organization lost the skills to migrate from MIM?

A skills gap is often one of the primary reasons why organizations are not moving away from MIM and may be preventing them from getting the benefits of Microsoft Entra.

Managing identities effectively isn’t easy. In an organization of any size, MIM will have been a significant implementation. It is likely to have been added to many times – extending it to include additional systems, modifying it to cope with new scenarios, fixing it to deal with edge cases that were not foreseen, and so on.

MIM is also a complex system, and not all organizations have fully documented how it works and/or updated documentation to reflect all the extensions, tweaks, and fixes.

“We can’t just switch MIM off!”

MIM is a very solid engine, sitting on a very solid database (SQL Server). It can literally run for years without so much as an oil change or a new timing belt. It is easy to forget that what it is doing is pretty clever, or even that it is there at all. This is great in one way at least – but it means that it is easy to lose the skills that are required to make modifications or – the crux of the matter here – the skills needed to migrate its functionality to the cloud, and eventually switch it off. Is your organization suffering from a MIM skills gap?

“We’d like to migrate services from MIM but we don’t know how!”

Standard MIM Portal functionality can largely be migrated to the cloud, conferring all the well-known advantages of cloud services. Such a move can also deliver enhanced functionality and a better user experience through self-service password reset, query-based/dynamic group management, self-service group management, and so on. Many businesses would like to do this, but the skills required to decommission these services away from MIM in a modular fashion, without interrupting the business, have either left the company or just become rusty.

The same arguments can be applied to MIM synchronization functionality, but probably less so. There are opportunities to migrate this functionality to the cloud, but that story is (as yet) incomplete.

[I’ll briefly note here that some organizations have invested heavily in extending the capabilities of the MIM Portal – for example, Oxford Computer Group Germany has many customers that have highly capable reporting and role management built-in. These organizations will be much more aware of their MIM implementation and will for sure have in place the means to formally manage it (usually through a services agreement with their provider). We can help here too, but this is a subject for another blog.] 

Is your organization struggling with a MIM skills gap?

Any questions? We’re here to help!

Oxford Computer Group UK is part of an international family of companies that has been helping organizations with identity management across the world for over two decades.

  • Our knowledge of MIM is unparalleled – but our expertise extends throughout the Microsoft identity stack, including Entra.
  • Our consultants have many decades of Microsoft identity management experience, and offer a safe and expert pair of hands to organizations from all industry sectors.
  • Our directors were commissioned by Microsoft to write the training courses for MIM – and the latest versions of these are available from our sister company Oxford Computer Training along with staff mentoring and ad-hoc support services.

Contact us today and arrange a no-obligation chat with one of our expert architects.

This blog is the third in my ‘Why is MIM not going away’ series.