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Identity Management Helps Business Gear Up

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CIOL Bureau
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Introduction: Businesses today have much to gain from the emerging force known as the Participation Age, where people interact with each other online as never before. This is the result of advances in Internet technology, global availability of communication networks, and an explosion of access devices. 

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Consumers and businesses alike are using networks to communicate, interact, and trade in ways that could only be imagined a decade ago. This unprecedented embrace of network-based participation requires ubiquitous access, where user identity is an essential enabler. 

Participation, after all, requires trust. And trust requires identity. It creates an undeniable and urgent need for businesses and individuals to know who is on the other end of their transactions and trust those entities, confident that the information they share is safe. Because identity management holds the answers to these needs, it is a key enabler of the Participation Age.

As the network becomes the place where more and more users interact with the world, their hunger for online services continues to grow. As a result, a new set of requirements is emerging for users and businesses alike. Users’ expectations for more choices, improved content, and better services are growing at unprecedented rates, and businesses are eager to meet those expectations by making a virtually infinite number of new applications and services available.

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Competitive pressures are also increasing, pushing enterprises to generate new lines of revenue and acquire new customers through rapid delivery of new services — all while keeping their current customer base happy and loyal by delivering the best customer experience. 

From this scenario emerges a new paradigm for the way people deploy, access, and use information, applications, and resources — where barriers to access must fall away, freeing users and businesses to take the online experience to known limits, and beyond.

In the last several years, dozens of new laws have been passed worldwide that are aimed at ensuring the security, integrity, and privacy of financial, consumer, and other sensitive data. The obligation to comply with these regulations and conform to their requirements has become foremost among business priorities, and identity management has been instrumental in meeting this obligation. In fact, identity management has played a key part in helping companies make compliance an integral and ongoing part of everyday business operations.

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The Role of Identity Management in the Participation Age: The issue is clear: How can businesses achieve the high levels of open access and secure control that will enable them to fully capitalize on growth opportunities? The key is identity management: It offers tools to operate securely and efficiently, achieve and sustain compliance, and protect critical information ranging from corporate resources to personal user information — all while offering access to more resources and users. By providing everything required to effectively manage identities, both within the enterprise and across traditional business boundaries, identity management makes it possible to securely deliver the right resources to the right people, at the right time, and in the right context. 

Today, evidence of this revolution is everywhere. In the enterprise, developer community, public sector, and among everyday users, new ways of interacting and creating communities and discussions are emerging on the network, In all of these contexts, boundaries blur and walls come down (or perhaps they just become invisible). This is why identity is central to the phenomenon of participation. Before consumers and businesses can fully engage with each other and the world online, they have to know the answer to the essential question of “who” — who they’re interacting with, who’s on the other side of a transaction, and who’s delivering the information they’re seeking or delivering.

How Identity Management Addresses Issues of Risk Reduction: How can identity management help reduce business risk? Effective identity management solutions do this by delivering tools and processes to increase security and trust, facilitate compliance, and control costs. 

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Security: Identity management addresses the security of networks and information on several levels. First, it supports a secure,  information-management strategy by applying authentication, authorization, security administration, and audit to information on the network or in storage. 

Further, it addresses security threats from inside or outside the organization by providing a centralized, overarching view of access to resources, revealing at any given time who has access to what; alerting administrators to potential risks to secure access; and automatically responding to threats. 

Identity management also makes it possible to closely manage a user’s entire identity life cycle, assigning appropriate access privileges at the start of the user’s relationship to the organization; changing and adjusting them as the relationship changes; and immediately terminating privileges when the user leaves or severs the relationship. In this process, identity management reduces risk by consistently applying and enforcing enterprise security policies to ensure adherence to corporate requirements and best practices. Within such a model, there is less risk of inappropriate or unauthorized access. And, if unauthorized access does occur, identity management systems can alert administrators immediately, to minimize its impact. 

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Secure access at work: One of the most valuable applications of identity management is its ability to effectively control access throughout a user’s life cycle. Let’s say Urmila joins an enterprise as a mid-level manager in Finance. 

Corporate security policy dictates her level of access to information, applications, and other resources, and identity management automatically provisions those resources accordingly. But what happens if Urmila changes jobs within the organization — gets a promotion to an executive Finance position, or makes a lateral move to a different part of the business, such as Marketing? As her level of access changes based on her change in status, identity management again automatically alters her privileges. 

Ultimately, if she leaves the company altogether, identity management instantly terminates her access privileges, minimizing the risk of her accessing sensitive information when she is no longer entitled to it. 

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Regulatory compliance: The ability to know who has access to what information and resources at any time is fundamental to complying with laws that govern data integrity and audit requirements. These abilities are absolutely essential given the recent growth not only in regulatory demands, but also in corporate pressures to improve audit performance. To address these issues fully, an effective identity management solution will not only reveal who has access now, but also provide historical reporting on access activities to show who had access in the past within any given timeframe, and who approved that access. 

Effective identity management also facilitates sustainable compliance through automation of key processes, so they are more effective and manageable on an ongoing basis. This improves audit performance overall and at the same time eliminates the risk of manual errors, reduces administrative burdens, and helps control costs associated with compliance. 

Make no mistake: Compliance and auditing are here to stay. Like the laws mandating the use of helmets in Bangalore, which were intended to help us travel more safely, compliance and audit requirements may be initially met with reluctance and resistance. But ultimately, businesses will come to understand that these requirements ensure that companies are operating safely and sanely as they accelerate toward greater growth. And as once-overwhelming compliance- and audit-related processes become part of the everyday business fabric, identity management will make them cost-effective, sustainable, and workable elements that deliver more than just compliance, but also true business value. 

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Regulatory compliance at work: With an appropriate identity management infrastructure in place, it means having an auditable record of access that can be used to prove compliance with access-related aspects of regulations. In a hospital system, for example, an identity management system can automatically track and report access to patient records. When someone accesses such records, administrators are aware not only of the access but of who authorized it, and this information is automatically documented. There’s never a need to scramble for auditable evidence or divert costly resources to uncovering it; the information is part of the everyday business process.

Cost control: Although cost continues to be a top-of-mind issue, the way in which businesses view the cost of operations is shifting, as they desire to do more with less, demonstrate significant return on technology investments, and realize true business value from those investments. 

Initially, the attraction of automated identity management was its ability to eliminate slow, labor-intensive, and error-prone manual processes; scale up to manage more identities without adding staff; and build on existing technologies to protect prior investments. But now, many businesses are leveraging automated identity management not only to increase efficiencies and reduce costs, but at the same time integrate previously distinct, business process silos to gain better alignment across the organization. This results in significant operational improvements, which contribute to both lower costs and higher profits. The less you need to invest in supporting technology infrastructure for growth, the more room you have for profitability. 

Cost control at work: In virtually any corporate environment, identity management can be linked with business assets in a variety of ways to control costs. Take telecom assets, for example. Identity management can be tied to them to exercise better control over cost-incurring resources such as calling cards, conference calling, and cell phone accounts. 

Specifically, identity management’s capabilities for tracking user-company relationships and managing access in accordance with those relationships can activate telecom accounts immediately upon a user’s association with the company, and terminate access instantly when the association ends. It is through creative applications of identity management such as this that companies are saving millions of dollars in hard costs every year. 

In summary, with costs under control, and security and compliance integrated into key business processes and technology applications, enterprises are in a position for growth, ready to meet the opportunities and demands of the Participation Age. Identity management technology lays a solid foundation upon which risk is manageable, paving the way for a wide-open road to success.

The right identity management solution strikes a perfect balance, facilitating interaction and collaboration while carefully controlling users’ access to applications and services across traditional business boundaries. The result is greater opportunity for businesses to increase their customer base and revenues, while protecting corporate information assets and customers’ private information.

Tirthankar Banerjee, Director - Software Business - Sun

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