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Enterprise identity and access management poses key challenges

Enterprise identity and access management (EIAM) has caught the attention of many corporations as a way to manage information and provide authentication for users wishing to access the company’s database and systems. Many security companies have taken on the development of EIAM, considering its potential value. A number, such as Deloitte, Touche LLP, Sun Microsystems and Accenture, have made a joint effort to leverage on each other’s experiences in corporate architectures and security systems to develop a robust EIAM system.

Their efforts are due to the recent demand for secured EIM systems for companies to protect their databases. However, Frost & Sullivan believes that there are several key challenges in EIAM that these developers need to address.

The first challenge is the reliability of the EIAM system. All profiles of an organisation’s employees will be stored in such a system and security and access policies will be set on each profile to ensure that every employee will be able to access the applications they need. However, if the profiles of the users are not well managed, they may become confused. This may then allow some users the opportunity to access confidential database information to which they should not be privy.

If there is any change in a user profile, the new information will have to be updated manually and correctly so that the user has the right control assess. Apart from internal users, vendors will also be given access priorities in developing the company infrastructure which may pose a security risk.

The second challenge is the usability of EIAM systems. If an employee needs to use more than one system over the course of his or her work, this person may end up having multiple logins and passwords to these multiple systems. This has to a large extent already been addressed in many of the newly developed EIAM offerings, where one login and password can be used across all systems and applications in a company across all branches. This helps to improve consistency.

The third challenge is integration. In a corporation, many applications and systems are required in a number of different departments for daily operations. The challenge that most security developers encountered when they tried to integrate disparate application systems and security infrastructure was that each had its own authentication technologies. Open source and standards-based approaches have however been combined to address this issue.

The fourth challenge is the exploitation on emerging technologies such as Identity 2.0 and Web 2.0 for EIAM systems. Identity 2.0 is a digital identity to provide access control that originated from the Web 2.0 theory. Identity 2.0 emphasises using one ID that is transparent and flexible for each user. However, there are potential risks in Identity 2.0 such as identity phishing. These risks need to be investigated further, as the Identity 2.0 framework has not been completed and development work is still in progress.

The fifth challenge is for EIAM systems developers to create standards that enable data exchange enterprises that meet both the security policies and user preferences in a company. A significant problem often arises due to differences in the viewpoints of the users of the system and the management of the company that sets the security policies. Moreover, different policies are set in each company. This makes it particularly tough to create standards that will be agreeable to two or more different companies when they need to use the same system.

To overcome this challenge, the open source community is collaborating to build open development platforms and standards that can see eye-to-eye. These standards can serve as the foundation for an EIAM system.

In short, an end-to-end EIAM system that enables interoperability, security, and privacy is required to ensure security for the entire identity management lifecycle in an enterprise. Based on the current technology trend, Frost & Sullivan expects to see more developments in the EIAM research area and that these challenges will be addressed in the near future.

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