Identity and Access Management: Hot or Not?

Identity and access management (IAM) is increasingly being deployed within organizations across multiple sectors as they recognize that a progressive approach to IAM is crucial for their companies. Though not yet mature, the IAM market continues to grow because of a number of influences and developments. Some of the developments include, among others, cloud computing, web solutions, information governance and BYOD.

To better understand how the market in moving toward IAM, let’s take a look at some of the developments and their impacts.

Moving to and using the cloud

On-premise solutions are being used less and less. Where hardware and applications were previously used in abundance and managed internally, solutions are now being moved to the cloud with an increasing amount of frequency. A main advantage of moving to the cloud is that this strategy allows organizations to make the work of their employees more flexible and allows them to work wherever they are located and to be far less dependent on local servers and other hardware. Therefore, as long as an Internet connection is available, staff can gain access to their applications and to their work.

Also, cloud applications impose far fewer demands on the equipment on which the work is done. What this means specifically is that these solutions grant employees more opportunity to work more freely from any device, be it a laptop, tablet or smartphone, as well as a desktop computer.

However, the cloud has little benefit for making the management of identity and access management solutions easier, unfortunately. Where tight integration arrangements within a network were the norm, the required collaboration with multiple cloud suppliers -- which all have their own standards -- means processes can becomes more difficult to manage in some cases. Stated another way, cloud applications have their own password policies, which means traditional LDAP authentication with the Active Directory becomes considerably more complex in it set up. Automatic management of user accounts and rights within the application also is increasingly more difficult. Finally, in addition, existing on-premises APIs no longer work over the Internet, which requires the functional application manager to operate with a manual user management interface.

WebSSO (single sign-on)

 With the growing use of cloud solutions, employees continue to have difficulty keeping track of their account credentials; this is not a new problem, but one that seems to have exacerbated recently. An often attempted solution to this problem is to offer staff and employees a portal where direct links to the various URLs for the web applications are clustered. Employees then only need to remember one URL, which is that of their own portal. The problem is, though, employees still need to remember a number of usernames and passwords once they’ve access this one URL because the applications hosted within it still need to be accessed.

A simple fix to this problem is one many are beginning to realize -- organizations can deploy WebSSO. With single sign-on (SSO), end-users only have to authenticate themselves once, entering a username and password from the Active Directory. WebSSO then takes over the log in processes, allowing users to not have to enter log in details again when wanting to open an additional application. With this approach, a user only needs to be authenticated once when entering the portal and the single sign-on software takes over the login processes for the cloud applications. This process is not only more user friendly, but also is more secure as it reduces the need for end users to write down credentials down or store them improperly to remember them.

Identity and access governance

Strict regulation in a variety of industries and across multiple sectors is helping make the use of IAM solutions more prevalent. Organizations must comply with audits or information requests, so many leaders require that their organizations clean up their information stores and in so doing, they put any rights pollution under the microscope. Since rights are often issued on the basis of copy-user or template users, pollution can easily creep in during the initial granting of rights. Manually charting the rights granted is highly complicated and time-consuming. In many instances continually managing the rights structure is simply not feasible.

Therefore, by using identity and access governance, organizations are able to easily ensure that employees only have the access to the network resources required to perform their duties. In the past, identity and access governance was largely the domain of financial institutions and major international concerns. Because of regulation and the increased need for the protection of data, governance of information is becoming more prevalent to a variety of institutions, including those in healthcare, small to enterprise companies and other commercial operations.

Broad access to information systems

Another recent development affecting the expansion of IAM solutions throughout enterprise is the increasing need to make information widely available to many parties. Growing numbers of people want or need access to information and information systems. For example, local authorities and  municipalities now allow the public regular access to their information systems to access certain data points or records. Within healthcare sector, patients require the ability to view their own medical details through secure portals and web-based sites.

Organizations are taking the initial steps and alongside their Active Directory are building up an LDAP store to enable broader access to information systems. This means that in addition to staff, external parties must also be provisioned and made known within the network. A user ID is needed and people must authenticate themselves to gain access to the information systems. With identity and access management it is possible to automate the provisioning and authentication process to reduce the overwhelming amount of manual tasks the IT department needs to perform.

Overall, the IAM market is hot continues to grow, evolving to meet the needs of organizations and the changes that they are making within their companies to operate more efficiently and change with the changing times.


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