White Paper: Security Management: The Evolution Of Identity And Access Management

By Bilhar Mann

Over the past decade, the role that IT plays in the corporate landscape has evolved at a pace that Darwin would find astounding. In an effort to survive, the fittest IT professionals have rapidly adapted a business-savvy persona, and, in most cases, business people are rapidly becoming more IT proficient.

Similarly, the role that the IT professional plays in Identity and Access Management (IAM) continues to move forward at a rapid rate. Where once its function was perceived as "keeping bad guys out" (and occasionally resetting passwords), IAM has become a key tool in the organization's risk management efforts. Companies have now reached the point where it has become nearly impossible to define where business functions end and IT functions begin.

Savvy IT professionals with evolving roles recognize that IAM can be even more. A recent study by CIO Magazine found that nearly 47% of CIOs describe the primary focus of their organization's IT strategy for 2007 as "Viewing IT as an enabler of business growth." This far and away outshined, "Improving IT performance" (25%) and "Reducing IT costs" (12%).²

Enabling business growth is not just the charter of CIOs, but of all IT professionals.

So how does IAM evolve beyond gate keeping and risk management into an "enabler for business growth?" The answer is that the IAM solution (and all security functions, for that matter) needs to become so tightly integrated into every aspect of the business that it essentially becomes part of the company's DNA. Unless it is truly encoded into the essence of the organization, IAM will become a vestigial organ and never fully realize its potential as a service that helps people both within and outside the organization get their jobs done securely, efficiently and cost effectively.

To better understand how this can be accomplished, we need to take a look back and see how IAM has adapted to meet the changing business climate.