"The Need for Identity Management,"
"Finding Opportunities in Identity Management,"
Identity and access management (IAM) is a powerful set of tools. It can improve efficiency (aka, save money); boost employee productivity by offering self-service and SSO (single sign-on); and give valued business partners, customers and suppliers customized access to internal resources. The downside is that, depending on how sprawling and complex your infrastructure is, especially in terms of identity stores, IAM can be a bear to implement. In "Roll Out the Red Carpet," we analyze the IAM market and examine the criteria for deciding if an IAM suite is right for you.
In the second part of our cover package, "I Manage, Therefore IAM", we review five IAM suites from Entegrity Solutions, Hewlett-Packard, Netegrity, Novell and RSA Security. Although we found the software relatively manageable, there is still uncertainty about the security specs, such as SAML, necessary for ubiquitous IAM, and defining access policies will require cooperation across many departments.
Still, the potential rewards are tantalizing: Some of the products we tested provide a password-synchronization module that syncs passwords between multiple repositories. In addition, all the products, except Entegrity's, support password self-service, letting end users change or reset their passwords without IT's help. The cost savings alone are enormous, especially for organizations that outsource their helpdesk and get charged per incident.
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