Identity and Access Management Solutions:
In today's increasingly global business environment, an organization's critical success factors include being able to move faster than its competitors and do more with less. Even mega-enterprises are expected to be as nimble as a start-up. It is critical that organizations increase the effective use of information technology to meet the threats and opportunities before them. But with increased deployment of IT systems for both internal and external use comes additional complexity.
A typical global enterprise can have hundreds of applications, thousands of business partners, tens of thousands of employees and hundreds of thousands of customers. All of these constituencies need to access corporate applications and data and they need to do it securely and in a way that ensures compliance with organizational policies and practices and the latest regulations. This is a non-trivial IT management task.
Identity and Access Management (IAM) software has emerged to provide the automation and control needed to scale to today's business requirements. Leading Identity and Access Management Solutions consist of a variety of modular, yet interrelated offerings, including identity administration, provisioning, single sign-on, access management, federation and identity audit & compliance with a common goal to help organizations streamline the management of all identities and computing resources used both for internal and external constituencies across the entire enterprise.
Identity and Access Management solutions is a core component of CA's Security Management and Enterprise IT Management (EITM) strategies. EITM leverages CA's broad IT management product portfolio and common integration platform to help enterprises manage risk and cost, improve service and align IT investments with business imperatives. This technology neutral approach, using cutting edge service oriented architecture (SOA) based components, enables organizations to add capabilities at their own pace.
This paper covers why Identity and Access Management Solutions is a critical success factor for today's enterprises and why CA's IAM solution provides a compelling solution to meet those needs. Then it delves specifically into CA Identity Manager CA's identity administration and provisioning component. You'll see why Identity Manager has built a market-leading position through a combination of best in class features, quick integration into existing IT environments, unmatched scalability and manageability and the ability to simultaneously support a variety of user constituencies including employees, partners and customers.
The Need for Identity and Access Management Solutions:
In today's business and technology environment, user accounts, entitlements, credentials and access can no longer be managed in a one-off, application specific (silo-ed) way. Corporate IT groups often need to support millions of users (both internal and external to the organization) and hundreds of applications. These silos of security are impeding productivity, the integrity of data, compliance and the user experience.
All the while, the pace of change continues to accelerate. Employees join, change responsibilities and leave companies at unprecedented rates. Moreover, diverse communities of partners and customers must be supported and there is increasing scrutiny on protecting private information and regulatory compliance. It's clear that more effectively managing identities is a critical success factor for every IT organization. Though it is possible to continue to manage identities manually or using custom built systems, the best practice is to use Identity and Access Management Solutions software on an enterprise-wide basis and build Identity and Access Management Solutions shared services that are leveraged by existing and future applications in a consistent way.
So what exactly are the benefits of Identity and Access Management Solutions?
In a nutshell, organizations are looking to improve operational execution and control, positively impact user satisfaction and assist in compliance efforts. Let's examine each of these in sequence:
Improve Operational Execution. Manually managing users or building user management into each application and/or resource is an expensive and time consuming proposition. Between the labor involved in adding users (or taking them away) and inevitable mistakes, ensuring each user has access that is consistent with his/her relationship with the firm, is typically tremendously expensive. By automating many of these functions with a world-class identity and access management solution, an organization's ability to manage users (regardless of whether they are internal, authorized partner personnel or customers) is dramatically streamlined.
An industry analyst recently did a study which predicted that a typical 10,000-employee company could save 14,000 hours of security administration time and 6,600 help desk hours annually by deploying an Identity and Access Management Solution.
