What new identity management solutions can offer today’s enterprise

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. Identities management
  3. The challenges of identities management in 2014
  4. Bridging the gaps
  5. Implications for the CIO
  6. How many of those identities?
  7. Key takeaways
  8. About Sal D’Agostino

1. Summary

Identity and access management (IAM) has traditionally focused on managing user information technology accounts in the enterprise. The rise of different types of accounts and identities such as cloud, mobile and other devices, e-commerce, and social networks has asymmetrically complicated things. Cloud, mobile, social, and personal networks have types of identities, platforms, services, and technologies not traditionally addressed by enterprise IAM. The result is fractured user authentication and authorization across applications and resources. There is not a single type of identity, identity token, or IAM that takes this into account. Identity management has very literally become identities management, and individuals and enterprises are struggling to keep up. In crafting IAM solutions to meet this evolving landscape, CIOs and those responsible for IAM deployments should take the following as given:

  • User accounts exploding in number and type require identity and access management providers to offer flexible solutions. Even with this flexibility, the enterprise will likely deploy multiple IAM solutions.
  • Multiple IAM solutions with multiple levels of identity assurance and attribute confidence mean that policy must adapt to the differences among identity types, and this will result in new and different procedures and workflows in order to manage users across these contexts.
  • The same cloud and mobile services are being consumed internally and provided externally. This is creating a new and symbiotic dynamic between IT and development organizations in the enterprise. The management and synchronization of internal and external services will become a core competency of IAM solutions.
  • Identity information — as widely defined here — is being generated and shared at astonishing rates. This creates extreme challenges for the protection of personal and corporate data and resources. In the enterprise, this drives a need for new ways to protect and share information while enabling a knowledge workforce.
  • The explosion, leakage, and compromise of data will drive a demand for identity and other analytics at the edge in all types of devices, further driving distributed solution architectures and new requirements and programming interfaces.
  • Personal data storage and clouds will become increasingly important systems of record and policy information, administration, and decision and enforcement points. IAM solutions will need to take this into account.

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