New Admin Portal for Akamai Enterprise Application Access
The definition of a user has evolved to comprise much more than an employee, making secure access to the right application, for the right user, at the right time difficult and complex. Akamai Enterprise Application Access (EAA) is a unique cloud architecture that closes all inbound firewall ports, while ensuring that only authorized users and devices have access to the internal applications they need -- not the entire network. To streamline application access, Akamai has released Enterprise Center, a new admin portal for EAA that:
- Creates a unified experience across multiple products with a modern look and feel
- Streamlines navigation via an intuitive layout, flexible sorting options, and advanced search capabilities
- Simplifies administration of access controls, authentication settings, multi-factor authentication (MFA) settings, and deployment
- Shortens release cycles to deliver enhancements and bug fixes at an accelerated pace
Unified experience
Enterprise Access, Enterprise Threat, and Akamai MFA can now all be administered from the unified Enterprise Center portal. The new UI helps improve efficiency and allows administrators to view and manage reports, dashboards, and widgets from a single portal. Now, administrators can gain deeper visibility and a more comprehensive overview of all data from one location to help make better decisions about securing access and protecting users.
Streamlined navigation
The new vertical navigation menu, breadcrumbs, object deep links, and re-designed table layout enable administrators to seamlessly navigate back and forth between application, connectors, and directories with minimal clicks. Inline editing on the connector list page allows you to directly edit connectors from the list page without opening a new page to apply basic connector edits. Not only does in-app contextual help provide informative text on every page, it also enables you to navigate directly to relevant, feature-specific documentation.
Advanced search enables administrators to quickly find and work on applications, connectors, users, identity providers (IdPs), or directories. Previously, name and description were the only supported search criteria. Now Enterprise Center administrators can search for applications, connectors, or directories using multiple contextual and config parameters, such as associated destination servers, deployment status, health, number of associated connectors, associated connector names, associated directories names, associated IdP name, enabled services, access control status, and more.
Simplified administration
The new Deployment Cart, which allows you to deploy multiple changes in bulk, is one of the key highlights of Enterprise Center. From this Deployment Cart, you can view the list of pending changes across your applications and IdPs, review specific changes if/when needed, select one or more changes that you need to deploy, and then deploy all the selected changes in one step by clicking a single button.
Access controls (ACLs) and Authentication settings can now be copied from an application or copied to a set of applications. This simplifies management of authentication and authorization settings across applications, minimizes errors, and helps ensure consistent enforcement of policies.
The application-level MFA settings have also been simplified. The new UI gives you an at-a-glance view of the effective MFA policy for the application, and intuitive gestures make it possible to configure MFA overrides at the application, directory, and group levels.
Shortened release cycles
Early in the design process, we made the decision to decouple the Administration Portal release process and adopt state-of-the-art DevOps practices. This has enabled us to shorten our portal release cycle, which means faster delivery of new features and bug fixes.
After months of beta testing and positive customer feedback -- including enjoyment of the modern, intuitive, and streamlined UI -- the EAA Enterprise Center UI is now in limited availability. The new UI is accessible to all EAA customers and can be accessed by logging into the Akamai Control Center and navigating to Enterprise > Enterprise Center. You can also access it directly from this link.
