Thanks to the opportunity to be the Securosis Contributing Analyst, I’m back to blogging here on Securosis even though Rich isn’t off getting bits of his body operated on. I’ve decided to revive an old Identity and Access Management (IDM) research project of mine to kick off my work here at Securosis.

Once you get past compliance, one of the biggest recent concerns for CIOs and CISOs has been IDM. This isn’t really that surprising when you consider that IDM is a key aspect of any successful security or compliance program. After all, how can you say with confidence whether or not you’ve had a breach, if you don’t know who has access to what data, or don’t have a process for granting and revoking that access?

In principle this should be pretty straightforward, right? Keep a database of users with what applications they have access to and whenever they change roles, re-evaluate that access and make the appropriate changes for their new (or now non-existent) role. Unfortunately, simple doesn’t mean easy. Many large enterprises have hundreds if not thousands of applications that they need to track and in many (most?) cases these applications are not centrally controlled, even if you just count the ‘critical’ ones. This disparate control will continue to get worse as corporations continue to embrace “The Cloud.” Realistically, companies are in a situation where IDM is not only a difficult problem to solve, but also a fairly complex one as well.

IDM is a large enough problem for enough companies that an entire market has sprung up over the last ten years to help organizations deal with it. In the beginning, IDM solutions were all about managing Moves, Adds and Changes (MAC) for accounts. There are several products to help with this issue, but by all reports many of them just make the situation even more complicated then it already was. Since these initial products hit the market, vendors who sell directory services, single sign on/federated identity, and entitlement services (to name just a few) have jumped onto the IDM bandwagon with claims to solve your woes. This has just caused even more confusion and made customers’ jobs even more difficult, causing many to ask: “Just what is IDM anyway?”

As a result, I’m planning on breaking up my project into two major pieces. One part of the larger project will be to evaluate the IDM space in order to make recommendations on what security practitioners should look for in such products, to the extent that they choose to go that route.

From my investigations to date, many companies (especially SMBs) don’t have a technology problem to solve, but rather one of process. As a result, the other part of this project will be to create a series of recommendations for companies to implement to make their IDM efforts more successful.

In the meantime, feel free to treat the comments here as an open thread for your thoughts on IDM and how to do it better.

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