Using identity management to deliver the right resources to the right people

Your business success depends on providing the right tools and information to the right people, when they need them. At the same time, your organization needs to protect its IT infrastructures and application systems from information theft, comply with regulatory mandates and internal security policies, and ensure the privacy of customer, partner, and employee information. This requires you to effectively manage identities – the people and the resources throughout your organization.

Employee productivity, business agility, compliance with industry regulations and internal security policies, and information security all depend on a comprehensive, well-architected approach to identity management. Without a strong identity management foundation, your new employees can sit idle, waiting for access to needed business applications, while your former employees or contractors continue to have access for days and weeks or even months after they have left your organization.

It is fair to say that identity management has become an outright necessity for today's companies and public sector organizations. What is also needed is the technology and tools that provide identity and effective control over both automatic processes and those processes that require human intervention.
An effective identity management solution can help you streamline your approval processes and enable the delegation of authority while providing self-service provisioning and password management features that ease the management burden on your help desk and security administration function. This, in turn, helps you lower your IT costs while increasing user satisfaction. Needless to say, but all of this must be achieved by leveraging, rather than ripping and replacing, your existing business processes and technology investments.

Automation Throughout the User Lifecycle

One important thing to remember is the fact that a well-designed identity management system, which meets your business and IT requirements, is only one of the key elements required for a successful identity management implementation. However, it is the element, with which you must typically live for at least 5-10 years.

One of the functions of an identity management system is to help you securely manage identity and access for your ever-changing user community through the complete management of the entire user lifecycle across all your systems and organizational and technical boundaries. It also lets you deliver first-day access to essential tools and applications, synchronize passwords and other identity information across connected systems and their identity information repositories, instantly modify or revoke access rights, and – increasingly importantly - enforce security and regulatory compliance.

For resources that require human intervention and approval, the identity management system automatically notifies appropriate approvers and enables them to quickly and easily provide or deny access. When necessary, it even allows them to easily delegate authority. In addition, from the time your new employee walks through the door on his or her first day with your company until he closes the door on his last, the identity management system has you covered - whether the processes can be done automatically or there is a need for human intervention as part of the approval workflow. All of these things are enabled by the three important capabilities of the identity management system: automated role-based provisioning, workflow-based provisioning, and password management.

Automated Role-based Provisioning

Using your business rules, the identity management system automatically provisions resources to your users based on their roles and relationships in your organization. Your new employees can access everything they need on their first day on the job - without your help desk or security administration team manually entering user information on multiple systems. You get more done with fewer people, which, in turn, saves you money and lets your IT personnel focus on more strategic development projects.

Workflow-based Provisioning

There are situations, where you do not want to or simply cannot fully automate the provisioning of all your resources. Sometimes, a person needs to decide whether access to a particular resource should be granted. This, in turn, raises the need for integrated, human-based workflow provisioning capabilities as part of an identity management solution. These capabilities help you electronically manage and streamline the entire process each time a resource is requested, even if human approval is required.
To achieve greater benefits in terms of improved manageability, life can also made easier if there is a single, integrated repository that stores all provisioned information.

The benefits of this approach are obvious: no more paper-based, error-prone processes, since all requests are made and approved electronically, and the automated approval process lets your people get to work as quickly as possible.

Simplifying Password Management

Typically, an employee, who forgets his password, must call the help desk for a password reset. This consumes his own valuable time and increases support costs. With an identity management system, you can synchronize a user's multiple passwords to provide a single strong password to all systems. Users are far more likely to remember a single password or a very limited number of passwords. But if they do not, they can receive hints or change the password through the self-service password management tool. Users can also manage their passwords using the native password interfaces in the underlying systems.

Ensuring that passwords your users set are secure is also of great importance from the enterprise security and compliance standpoint. An identity management system must enable you to create and enforce strong, system-wide password policies to protect your organization against password-related attacks.

Importance of the Right Identity Management Foundation

Identity is a common thread in a wide variety of today's enterprise security and compliance issues. As highlighted above, without the manageable, scalable, and flexible identity management foundation, each new application system, which you add to your IT environment, creates another identity silo and adds to your security challenges and management complexity.

A well-designed identity management solution removes barriers between your information systems and enables information to securely flow to your authorized users. You have the underlying foundation you need to securely deliver the right tools and information to the right people. Your business rules can be leveraged by your identity management system to recognize and immediately deliver the right resources to the right people based on who they are and their role or relationship with your organization.