Identity And Access Management Alleviating End-user Identity Crisis

By Author: Martin Lobo
Total Articles: 355
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The globalized business environment today being aggressively competitive makes use of every technological innovation to increase the accessibility of data and information to the customers, partners , vendors and suppliers. However, in the process of meeting up to the demands of the various entities, the organizations tend to use a number of applications, various security models and identity systems which may not always be compatible. This leads to inefficiencies in the corporate network which further leads to data and identity thefts and unauthorized access to business critical data.

With security measures such as password based entry been deployed in the access points to corporate network, the need for frequent changes in the password leads to multiple repositories of user-id's with multiple passwords. Juggling through this password puzzle leads to confusion for the end-user and benefit for the cyber criminal. To keep such situations at bay, organizations need to make use of effective identity and access management systems that would provide a comprehensive and focused approach to security issues of the corporate network ...
... end-users and will also ensure compliance and efficiency in securing the vital business information.

Further, the growing demands on information technology has led to global organizations to depend on IT outsourcing of data center operations, desktop and help desk support, software applications development, network operations and disaster recovery. However, though this helps the organization in fulfilling the IT needs of the customers, it also leaves open a wide scope for cyber attacks and misuse of critical data.

Identity and Access management can thus be defined as a set of policies, processes, and technologies used for creation, and management of digital identities. With the objective to provide right access to the right people at the right time, efficient identity and access management solutions will help organizations manage access to the information and applications within the organizational network without compromising security. The solution refers to the process of creating, propagating, and maintaining user identity and privileges and comprises of four main modules :

Authentication- verification and proving the identity for gaining access to an application system or resource.
Authorization- determination and confirmation of an identity and allowing access to a system or resource to perform some action.
User Management- refers to management and regulation of identity creation, password re-setting, transmission of information and various others, from the creation digital entity to its termination
Enterprise Directory- refers to the repository used for storing the digital identities, credentials and attributes for reference.

With information security being the major cause of concern for most of the techno savvy organizations, use of identity and access management system will help organizations to authorize administration within an organization which will facilitate in recognizing any entry without permission. Hence, it provides complete security to an organization, protects both confidential and personal data and helps organization achieve operational efficiency.

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