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Compliance Is the Requirement; Business Improvement Is the Opportunity
Managing the identities and access rights of those inside and outside the enterprise has become a primary concern for IT organizations today. The interest in IAM is driven by the combination of increasing regulatory compliance requirements and the ongoing need for IT to reduce costs and manage risk while improving business performance at the same time.
The Rise of Regulatory Compliance
Governmental and industry regulations covering IT security typically have very specific requirements related to identifying IT users, knowing what applications and resources they are entitled to access, recording when they access them, and knowing what they do while they have access. Creating a set of automated and strong internal security controls around user identities and access, as well as data privacy, can greatly ease the burden of meeting these requirements.
We call this ability to deliver automated and integrated compliance “continuous compliance” because it allows compliance to be done efficiently on an ongoing and sustained basis. This notion requires that the enterprise:
- Automate manual processes and thereby do a better job of sustaining compliance and controlling costs
- Put proper controls in place for managing user access across all business platforms
- Provide proof of controls through monitoring and auditing capabilities
- Improve business performance by securing and better enabling web business applications
Reducing Costs and Risk While Enabling Business Growth
In addition to meeting regulatory compliance requirements, the IT organization continues to be challenged to “do more with less” across the board. These additional challenges include reducing overall IT management costs, managing risk, and helping to enable business growth and new opportunities throughout the enterprise.
MANAGING COST AND RISK As businesses expand and evolve they go through waves of transformation. New applications are adopted and made available to employees, business partners and customers, which creates a growing number of digital identities and escalating administrative costs. Because of emerging security mandates around privacy and data confidentiality, IT administrators are burdened with additional access and auditing projects. Increasing demands on existing limited resources require greater efficiency. Disparate existing systems and processes for user administration, provisioning and access rights management extend the problem, causing increased help desk costs, reduced security and increased IT-related risk.
GROWTH OF THE BUSINESS ECOSYSTEM
Clearly, managing users and their access is no longer a simple task. In addition to employees, an organization’s customers, suppliers and partners are now integral stakeholders who require access to applications and data as well. Business partners require a trusted relationship to execute business transactions. And your organization is often required to provide public-facing websites and business processes via exposed Web services. The complexity of identity management is compounded because it must have the capability to manage identities and security in different types of legacy and distributed systems and applications, including HR, ERP and supply chain management systems.
Connecting IAM to Overall IT Management
Finally, effective IAM and security management cannot exist in isolation. It should be viewed as part of an overall IT management requirement that covers many disciplines. To optimize the performance, reliability and efficiency of enterprise-wide IT environments, you need to tightly integrate the control and management of distinct functions such as operations, storage, and life cycle and service management, along with IT security.
Address Multiple Issues with an Integrated IAM Suite
To effectively address this broad range of issues, an IAM solution should be comprehensive and well integrated across its own components as well as with the rest of your IT management infrastructure.
A Comprehensive Solution
A full solution should address your organization’s complete IAM requirements without disrupting current business processes. Broad coverage of applications and platforms, comprehensive capabilities including automated workflow processes and entitlement management, and the ability to connect legacy systems with distributed environments and web-based services all have become critical to meeting the needs of your enterprise.
A Modular Suite with Common Components
The ideal IAM solution should offer flexibility to protect current investments and enable your enterprise to address all aspects of IAM in the customer, partner and enterprise domains. It should also provide integration with business-critical applications as well as among its own components, avoiding the cost to perform time-consuming integration tasks.
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