50% Cos Will Shift IAM Efforts To Intelligence By 2014

Organisations are rapidly shifting their identity and access management (IAM) efforts from a tactical focus on administration to a strategic focus on intelligence, according to Gartner, Inc.

“The need to limit costs and deliver real world business results is forcing IAM professionals to take a more strategic approach to IAM,” said Ant Allan, Research Vice President, Gartner. “With this in mind, we have developed a set of key predictions for 2011 and beyond to aid chief information security officers (CISOs) and other IAM stakeholders when allocating resources and selecting IAM products and services.”

By 2014, notable project failures will cause 50 percent of organisations to shift their IAM efforts to intelligence, rather than administration.

Focusing IAM projects on intelligence — monitoring, log collection, correlation, analytics and reporting ensures that identity and access intelligence (IAI) tools can deliver quick answers to business questions.

Organisations that fail to adopt a formal and effective approach to delivering IAM with IAI will continue to experience delivery challenges as the business places less emphasis on IT’s need for operations efficiency and more emphasis on the organisation’s needs for accountability and reliability of access.

Analysts recommend that organisations insist that IAM vendors provide their data models in identity and access event logs and repositories to review available data and information. A catalogue of IAI information should be developed that can benefit specific business intelligence use cases to deliver credibility to future IAM implementations.

By year-end 2013, fewer than 10 percent of all authentication events will involve discrete, specialised authentication hardware of any kind.

As organisations adopt more-robust alternatives to passwords in more situations, they are increasingly considering alternative authentication methods that will enable them to meet their needs for improved security at a lower cost and with a better user experience. Authentication vendors that focus on specialised authentication hardware will find that they are competing in an increasingly niche market. Enterprise broad-portfolio authentication vendors, as well as commodity and specialist vendors, offering alternative authentication methods will be best positioned to capitalise on enterprises’ future investments in new authentication methods. At the same time, they also will continue to see opportunities erode as other vendors and service providers (such as Check Point, Google and Facebook) continue to embed alternative authentication methods in their offerings.

By the end of 2015, more than 50 percent of cloud-based IAM offerings will be hybrid solutions.

A ‘hybrid’ cloud-based IAM solution is defined as using enterprise-based IAM software and scalable service-based technologies integrated for cloud computing. Enterprise IAM implementations continue to be complex and cost-prohibitive to implement or upgrade, and many organisations are seeking simpler implementation and extension strategies. As IAM technologies continue to mature, they are re-architected as services, with the simplest and most-common technologies targeted first for rewriting. The transition to cloud-based IAM computing will be challenging, but will provide organisations with a foundation for experimentation with relatively low risk, without the need to make major investments or compromise privacy.

Gartner advises organisations to review the current state of individual IAM components, to assess their availability and ability to address existing IAM requirements before making any significant IAM product acquisitions. IT leaders should also assess the impact of inevitable IAM product and service acquisitions in the market on their own IAM implementation road map plan.