Advantages and Disadvantages of ILM

Each enterprise product has characteristic advantages and disadvantages, and Microsoft Integrated Lifecycle Manager (ILM) is no different.

The Microsoft ILM product has the following advantages over many of the rival Identity Management (IM) products:

• Broad support for data sources and targets including directories, operating systems, messaging services, databases, mainframes and so on;
• Efficient attribute level identification and synchronisation of changes;
• Caching of identity data allows operation within architectures with poor or intermittent connectivity;
• Close integration with .NET Framework provides easy integration with Microsoft and many third-party applications;
• Extensible architecture allows the addition of new Management Agents (MA) for legacy data sources and targets;
• Powerful declarative rules drive the provisioning of objects and the flow of attributes between connected data sources and targets; and
• Easily extensible provisioning, de-provisioning and attribute flow rules allow complex identity manipulation to be performed.

The Microsoft ILM product suffers the following disadvantages when compared to many of the rival Identity Management (IM) products:

• No built-in support for high-availability solutions;
• Closely bound to Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server upon which it is dependent;
• Extremely intensive use of processor and disc resources;
• No official support for operation within a virtualised environment;
• No capability for scheduled (asynchronous) or change-driven (synchronous) operation without additional software;
• Performance of full synchronisation operations (typical when bootstrapping a solution) can be poor; and
• One-to-many and many-to-many relationships between identity objects can be problematic to deal with.