A Perspective on Identity Management

Organizations have many mundane tasks that are crucial to the organization’s ability to function efficiently on a day to day basis. These tasks such as provisioning and de-provisioning of user accounts are driven by internal and external changes in the organization due to policy, personnel changes and regulatory compliance mandates.

While these tasks can be done by manually by your internal IT staff it does not enable the organization to timely and consistently execute on these repetitive and mundane tasks like an Identity Automation system. Further, these tasks are also a direct expression of what the organization policy is in regards to providing access to physical and electronic resources. What must be considered is that internal IT Staff may be very good at providing these services, what happens when they are sick, on vacation or leave for another job. More likely, what if they are swamped with infrastructure project are over worked or buried in other day to day tasks.

Regardless of reason for the absence of these key personnel it impacts the organization negatively. The result is access permission (keys) to the organization’s services are not properly maintained resulting in potentially security breaches, delay in servicing request and impacting other projects or departments. For example, a terminated employee may gain improper access to data or services while the operational personnel are struggling to with day to day workloads. Correcting these issues will result in an expenditure of time and effort from employees, managers and support personnel to identify and correct the required access controls. Take an afternoon to perform the exercise of quantifying this type of potential breach, and then multiply it by the number of times per week this could (and probably does) happen. Congratulations, you just found your IDM budget!

When you look at it from this perspective, providing an Identity Automation system to address these key day to day tasks is an critical organizational objective. However, making the best technological choice to support the organization short term, medium and long term goals in this space is not quite as easy as it seems.

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