Identity Management – Driving Compliance, Improving Speed to Market

To read this blog in full, please visit http://talk.bmc.com/blogs/blog-allen/phil-allen/

The issue of identity management has found its way to the top of the agenda within the financial services industry and has become a board-level discussion for many organisations in the sector. Tough new regulatory measures are forcing financial services providers to ensure greater transparency in the way they manage risk. Every interaction with an external individual or organisation has the potential to result in funds being passed out of the company, which means that all customer-facing activity has clear and direct financial implications. Because of this, a fundamental aspect of any risk-management strategy is the ability to accurately authenticate the identity of all customers and have a clear understanding of their relationship with your company.

Every activity within a financial services organisation involves money, and so any identity misuse presents a direct financial risk to the company. With identity theft widely recognised as the fastest growing category of crime in the UK, it should be easy to see why identity management is no longer simply a technical issue for the IT department, but a major concern throughout the enterprise.

While security and compliance are obviously key points, identity management is an enabler that brings a number of tangible business benefits. As a growing number of conventional financial institutions look to the Internet as a new route to market, new problems are created that can best be solved with strong identity management. When you take banking processes out of high street branches and place them into the online environment, the first and most obvious problem that needs to be addressed is how your customers are able to authenticate themselves.

The other main difference is that when a customer has a face-to-face relationship with a local branch, the staff is likely to know what products and services that customer uses and the general status of their relationship. This is lost when the process is taken online. The challenge for providers is to maintain that level of personal service and security, despite the fact that they may never get to meet the customer in person.

Good identity management technology helps organisations achieve this goal. First and foremost, it provides the ability to establish a customer’s identity with a high degree of effectiveness. Once this fundamental step has been taken care of, the technology can help provide a holistic view of that customer so you know exactly which of your products and services they use (or could be interested in) and are able to handle them accordingly.

Being able to provide your customers with access to all of their accounts with your organisation through a single, unified point is only the beginning. A well-formed identity management solution enables you to integrate services from your partners into the customer experience. Even though you may not share an interlinked IT infrastructure with your partners, a solid identity management system can make it easy to build a trust model between your organisations, which allows your online services to appear seamlessly integrated in the eyes of your customers.

This ability to integrate services from partners in this way means that you can build a process and supply chain spanning several different organisations in a relatively short timeframe. This in turn enables financial services providers to develop new products and bring them to market faster than ever before, which is essential for any modern business to remain competitive in this sector.

This is also linked to the regulation compliance aspect of identity management. The obligation to monitor and audit processes in an open and transparent way puts an enormous internal administrative overhead on companies. Those companies that don’t get it right will become rigid and inflexible, so when they need to implement new processes to roll out new products, they will find it difficult and time consuming. Organisations that invest in the right kind of identity management solutions will be able to operate more flexibly and efficiently and will find the technology that they implemented to achieve compliance actually provides tangible benefits, rather than simply being a legislative burden.

BMC helps organisations align their resources with their business objectives, and our identity management solutions are specifically geared toward aligning the human element of their resources to those objectives. We offer a complete end-to-end identity management solution that is unique in the market in that it integrates tightly with our full spectrum of business service management systems to provide a holistic business service view of your whole organisation.

Tim Dunn
Director Identity Management - EMEA
BMC Software

The High Road to BSM

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Ask Somesh Singh about his long and varied career in technology, and he might tell you a story about his first day at IBM, back in the 1980s. Other employees warned him that it might take months to get access to the IT systems he needed if he waited for his paperwork to find its way to each administrator in the system. So, he spent his first day, walking from office to office, personally securing signatures and permissions from each system administrator, so he could do his job. And this, emphasizes Singh, was at one of the foremost technology companies in the world.

Thankfully, a lot has changed since those days, but identity management has not become any less complex, nor is it less critical. Customers these days, says Singh, express concern around five basic issues:

• How to reduce the risk of improper use of IT assets
• How to operationalize today's maze of compliance requirements
• How to get employees productive right away and then keep up with employees throughout their careers and various needs for IT access
• How to cut administrative costs, and
• How to give access to partners, customers, and suppliers to the IT infrastructure in a secure manner that also complies with policy.

These critical customer needs are met in BMC Software's identity management solution, says Singh, and implementing it is an important step on the road to aligning your IT assets with the needs of your business, no matter what size.

On the Front Lines of Identity Management - Blog

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Hi there, as the first entry in this Identity Management focused blog, I’d like to introduce myself and share a little on what content and thoughts you can expect me to be delivering over the coming months. Who am I, and what am I doing writing a blog?

My name is Phil Allen and I am a Senior Consultant with the EMEA Identity Management team at BMC Software. I started my work in IT in support where I learned that customers are the most important people we deal with on a daily basis (a point which I feel is often overlooked) and I then moved into direct customer facing roles working with customers to identify their needs and help them meet their business needs. Having worked for the last 8 years helping customers adopt what has more recently become know as the Identity Management, I hope to share my experiences of the issues and the solutions of this ever changing arena.

Why a blog? At first I thought this was an easy answer, express my views, share my thoughts, voice my concerns, but then I thought further and deeper. Being a person who has always expressed my views, I am a firm believer that if you think something should be said then say it. So the overall reason for starting this is to provide a forum through which open discussions and thoughts can start.

To read this blog in full, please visit http://talk.bmc.com/blogs/blog-allen/phil-allen/