IT directors and chief information officers face
barriers limiting their ability to deployidentity management technology,
including the inability of products to work across company
boundaries, lack of common standards, and unclear contractual
obligations.
In his keynote presentation at the
Burton Catalyst
conference in Barcelona, Jamie Lewis, chief executive officer
of Burton Group, said,
"
Identity management is fundamental to enable business."
Identity management technology allows businesses to collobarate
with business partners and customers, and supports regulatory
compliance.
Identity management covers several areas of IT including
federated
identity services,
single
sign-on, authentication and
directory
services, to allow businesses to grant users access to IT
systems. But research from Burton Group has found that no IT
product can provide all the functions businesses require for
identity management.
Markus Salo, concept owner for identity and access management at
Nokia has recently undertaken a project to provide an identity
management system for several thousand users. The system supports
Nokia Siemens Network (NSN), a partnership between Nokia and
Siemens.
Salo said, "We needed to establish an identity exchange to allow
user identities to be shared between the two companies." However,
he could find no product to suport identity exchange. Instead Salo
said he had to adapt existing technology.
The unwillingness of suppliers to take on liability for their
products is another potential hurdle. Anne Terwilliger, director of
security projects at Visa International, said that suppliers
working on identity management needed to take on greater
responsibility, in a similar way to credit card providers. "There
is a legal liability to protect user data and privacy," she
said.
Another area of concern is lack of compatible products.
Eve Maler, an inventor of XML and technology director at Sun
Microsystems, said, "There is a lot of oportunity to bring
standards like
PKI
and SAML together,
to enable users to build applications faster and avoid security and
quality isues."
June Leung, senior manager of security and business recovery at
FundServ, a company specialising in applications for the financial
services industry, said, "Businesses are paying a lot of money for
different products." Leung believed this cost could be reduced if
there was a single standard.