The economic slowdown, will drive businesses to find low-cost
ways to manage secure access to their corporate networks.
In his keynote presentation today at
Burton
Group's Catalyst conference in Prague, Burton Group chief
executive officer Jamie Lewis, said, "A year ago IT needed to do
more with less. Today we are being asked to do less with less. Very
few people will buy full identity management suites because they
cannot justify the cost. Businesses must focus on the [identity]
controls that matter."
For instance, he said
rogue trading in the banking sector demonstrates the need for
businesses to do a better job at risk control, by focussing on
where the risk resides. So, in the banking example, the risk is
with traders.
But this control becomes expensive if a business needs to manage
access control and identity for its partners, customers and staff
according to Gerry Gebel, a service director at Burton Group. "It
costs a lot of money to manage staff, but why should businesses
need to spend the same amount managing the companies they do
ecommerce with. In the current economic conditions, why should I
manage my business partners' users."
Instead Gebel recommended that IT directors need to push back
management of external users to their business partners. In this
scenario he said the IT department controls access. "I manage
access to my applications, the business partners manage their
users," he explained.
Geber urged IT directors to look at how to use federated
identity management to push the
identity management of users to their business partners.
Federation is a well-understood business concept, to manage
business partners in the global economy. "IT has been slow to
follow suite. It enables IT to manage people easier."
But Geber warned that this technology is not quite ready,
although progress is being made. "Federated identity management is
immature and requires co-ordination between business partners."
He expected that the emergence of federation as a service would
play an important role in federated identity management. Here, a
third-party intermediary handles the trust relationships between
business partners, which simplifies coordination.