What are the common characteristics likely to influence a business’s decision to implement an Identity & Access Management solution?
The business drivers for an IAM implementation project vary across organizations and categories, such as Finance, Healthcare, and Government. In this piece, we focus on the key drivers across industries as defined by our own survey of IAM engagements taken from clients both local and global in scale.
Our results indicate that IAM adoption is strongly related to the degree of industry regulation and more weakly to the extent of size of the organization. Regulation is a significant driver in Healthcare and Financial Services, in particular.
Four of the most common business drivers that influence Identity Management projects are Compliance, Operational Efficiency, Business Enablement, and Security.
Compliance
- Centralized auditing and reporting
- IT & Security Policies administered consistently
- Enforcement of Least Privileges
- Enforcement of Separation of Duties
- Logging of access requests and approvals/denials
- Consistent off-boarding of users
Operational Efficiency/Scale
- Centralized platform that can manage peak transaction volumes
- Automation of routine tasks – account provisioning, data updates, role assignments, terminations
- Role based access – eliminate approvals where not required
- Role based access – Eliminate approvals
- Request based access
- Fewer support staff
- Fewer operations staff
Business Enablement/Improved Service Levels
- BYOD/mobile devices
- Cloud (SaaS, in particular)
- User Productivity – less time to provision access, self-service tools
- Customer management/services
- Productivity of end users – faster access, self-service tools, single-sign on, fewer errors
Security
- Consistent application of policy
- Centralized logging and reporting to feed SIEM tools (e.g. Splunk, QRadar)
- Integration with HR system to tie access to user’s current status (active, on leave, terminated)
- Central authentication services
In the next blog, we will take a look at some of the short-sighted decisions that organizations make when selecting a technology based on a single pain point, or business driver, that often fails to deliver enough value to the business to justify the investment.
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