The need for scalability, flexibility & higher productivity has led many businesses to extend their processes and infrastructure beyond premises. Concepts like BYOD, remote access and others have therefore gained much speed lately. While the benefits of such flexibility and availability are manifold, businesses always run a risk of breaches & threats that can lead to non compliance. This business problem has recently added popularity to Identity and Access Management (IAM) system that facilitates the management of electronic identities for business processes; inclusive of the technology needed to support it. IAM has come up as a significant basis for realizing business benefits, that is, operational efficiency, management control, cost savings and business growth. It enables enterprises to manage information access and applications spread across internal and external systems, without compromising on security or exposing sensitive information.
How can businesses benefit from implementing IAM?
IAM’s ultimate goal is to provide the right access to the right people at the right time. With IAM Framework, businesses can:
- Facilitate the identification of loop holes in control points by a phased approach of providing access controls
- Enhance business value by improving security
- Improve compliance with various industry regulations and create opportunities for new business initiatives
- Reduce overall effort of IT administration
- Improve the productivity of employees and other members
- Create more effective customer support
- Streamline IT management in large organizations for enhancing overall ROI for business
- Provide scalable approach that enables IT expansion in growing organizations
IAM includes people, processes and products to manage identities and access to the resources of an organization. For IAM Framework to function properly, the organization has to make sure of the correctness of data. Its components can be classified into four categories:
- Authentication: module through which a user provides adequate identification to gain initial access to an application system or a particular resource
- Authorization: module that determines whether a user is permitted to access a particular resource
- User Management: module that defines the set of administrative functions such as identity creation, propagation and maintenance of user identity and privileges
- Central User Repository: that stores and delivers identity information to other services and provides service to verify credentials submitted by clients
The technology can be used to activate, capture, document and control user identities and their related access permissions in an automated method. This ensures that access privileges are granted according to one interpretation of policy and all individuals and services are properly authenticated, authorized and audited.
Subhash is a former Happiest Mind and this content was created and published during his tenure.
