Identity Management

How secure are you? Secure enough? Responsibility & Accountability - Audit & Compliance Saving Time and Money Make sure only AUTHORISED people have access When embarking on the road to implementing an Identity & Access Management solution, remember to ensure sound naming conventions are agreed and implemented across the organisation. The reason why you are probably going through the problems with the clean up required to be done before you get to the real deployment are almost certainly down to these not having been established properly in the first place. Cross referencing email addresses user-ids etc.

Organisations need to be able to identify everyone involved in their business processes unambiguously. They have to control what people with what rights can access what resources and when. These challenges are anything but trivial. Employees, partners, customers and suppliers enjoy different privileges when it comes to accessing information, applications and premises, privileges that may have to be changed or even completely revoked in the course of time. Enterprises with a few hundred employees and more need a quick, secure and reliable means of granting and managing access rights. Information about users is typically stored in numerous distributed directories, and the applications and services to be protected are based on heterogeneous platforms. In such a situation, ensuring compliance with legal requirements is a very complex task. If communications security policies and compliance requirements are to be enforced efficiently and consistently throughout an enterprise, all directories must first be kept up-to date and consistent on the fly. Second, it must be possible to update the user authorization profiles for all systems from a central point of administration and across all platforms with the ability to devolve responsibility specific administrative functions to local security administrators if required. These two requirements can only be met by comprehensive Identity and Access Management that provides user data centrally, grants permissions dynamically, and controls access securely. Identity and Access Management also opens up new possibilities for strategic partnerships. Joint and trusted use can be made of identities with partners outside the enterprise network (federated identities.) Users can easily switch between local and external partner applications without having to sign on again.

EXIT PROCESS

All too often focus is given to the front end, the setting up of the authorisation process (Through Workflow) and not the exit process, the cleaning up of access when an individual moves to another part of an organisation or leaves the company. It is extremely important to remember to have appropriate processes in place to ensure access is removed from all data bases, applications and data and where appropriate data from that individual's laptop/desktop.