Securing Identity Access

Indian organisations are fast beginning to realise the issues related to management of identities and their access to applications. Organisations are looking at various options to automate the entire lifecycle of users through Identity and Access Management and Federated identity management solutions.

Specialised players are offering consulting and system integration services around the Identity Management solutions. IDC forecasts the worldwide market to reach $4 billion in 2007. With the burgeoning of BPOs and KPOs, the market for Identity management has evolved in India.

Addressing emerging security issues

Identity Management solutions support business and IT changes by providing centralised control of user identities. Identity Management is an integrated, scalable and robust infrastructure that allows enterprises to manage end-to-end lifecycle of user identities across all enterprise resources both within and beyond the firewall.

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Software majors like Oracle, HP and IBM are coming up with their offerings to address the key areas of identity management. Vendors are adding new features to traditional technology to help their customers address the newly evolving security issues. Recently, Oracle expanded its offerings in the identity management segment by introducing new features to the Oracle Extended Identity Management Ecosystems. Aldrin S D’souza, country manager, Tivoli, SWG, IBM India explains, “A typical identity management solution should address key areas like identity lifecycle management, identity control, identity federation and identity foundation. IBM’s Tivoli range of solutions is focusing on these areas and trying to reduce the pain points of organisations as far as managing the identity is concerned.”

Organisations are implementing identity and access management in a bid to achieve higher ROI by automating resource provisioning, improving the efficiency of identity administration and reducing risk by enforcing authentication and access management polices uniformly across all of their Web applications.

Reducing the security budget

Identity management solutions provide out-of-the-box capabilities for automatic provisioning and de-provisioning of user accounts across systems, which typically include creation, deletion and modification of user IDs. This enables the enterprise to save time and money on administrative activities by having a single point of administration for the entire network. No more security breaches using orphan accounts.

Sameer Karmakar, product manager, Identity Management, Persistent Systems, reflects, “Security has been a low budget area for most of the companies. While allocating budget for security, most of the CIOs or CISOs face numerous challenges to get the budget passed from the management. Through these solutions, cost saving is realised by automation, enhanced productivity and the elimination of redundant manual tasks. Looking at most of the areas within security today, identity management has one of the most quantifiable value propositions.”

Online business fuelling growth

To compete effectively in today’s competitive business scenario, organisations are increasing the number of users – customers, employees, partners and suppliers that are allowed to access information. Hence, managing user identities and their access to resources throughout the identity lifecycle has become even more difficult. D’souza states, “Typical IT environments have many local administrators using manual processes to implement user changes across multiple systems and applications. As identity management grows more costly, it can inhibit the development and deployment of new business initiatives. As companies deal with a host of security vulnerabilities, they are centralising identity and access management functions generally by using software solutions that aggregate control and visibility across multiple applications.”

Identity management and access control are major concerns for companies doing business online. Companies need to identify each network user and then determine which resources he or she is allowed to access. Some companies enforce separate access policies for each application. While this approach provides maximum flexibility in the short term, it soon becomes a liability as online business processes grow in number and complexity. Companies need to create a new identity management framework for each new application and users must remember a growing number of user names, passwords and login procedures.