Biggest Trends in Identity and Access Management - Twenty-Four Seven Security

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November 29, 2007
Biggest Trends in Identity and Access Management

In yesterday's blog, many of the folks I met with at the Gartner IAM show in LA answered what they thought was the biggest challenge for Identity and Access Management in 2008. The next question I asked was what they thought would be the biggest trend for IAM in 2008.

Also, in yesterday's blog, I offered proof that IAM was the hottest thing around. I offer that proof at the very bottom.

So the answers to the biggest trend for IAM in 2008 follow:

Brandon Whichard, Product Line Manager, Identity Management, Sun Microsystems:

The main trend for IAM in 2008 will be the proliferation of Business Role Lifecycle Management, which represents the next evolutionary phase of Identity and Access Management by creating additional efficiencies through compliant provisioning and further reducing IT and help desk costs.

Howard Ting of Securent:

With most enterprise identity houses in order, addressing the authorization challenge seems like the logical next big thing.

Mark L. Feldman, Ph.D., Alert Enterprise:

2008 will see serious efforts to introduce rules-based, intelligent systems capable of co-relating events and identifying a broad cross-section of potential risks (from access to environmental health and safety) in time to prevent and mitigate dangers.

Martin Ryan, Vice President Worldwide Sales and Marketing of e-DMZ:

We see a strong trend towards strong auditing. Being able to answer the questions, who had access, when they had access, where they had access and most importantly what they did.

Omar Hussain, President and CEO of Imprivata:

IAM products, particularly those that help address password management and network authentication, will cross the CHASM and become a necessity like firewalls, VPN, and SPAM filters. It will be hard to imagine companies not addressing security, compliance and user convenience issues and continuing to live with the cost and pain that can be easily addressed with IAM solutions.

Mark Ford, CISSP, Principal, Leader, National Identity & Access Management of Deloitte & Touche LLP:

We are seeing a significant up-take of IAM technology and services by major corporations currently. This should drive more capital into the IAM market, and provide for more innovative IAM technology to emerge in 2008. We will also see the continued consolidation of IAM technology into the major business application technology companies.

David Fusari, Vice President, CTO of Sentillion:

I think for IAM in 2008 we will see growth in role-based identity management projects. We will also continue to see projects around access management like SSO but with the additional use of context information to refine user access.

Jackson Shaw, the Sr. Product Manager of Quest:

The main trend in 2008 for IAM will be around authorization and identity-based web services. Companies and vendors will start thinking about how to best solve these two significant problems.

Venkat Raghavan, Director, IBM Tivoli Security Market Management:

Businesses are moving beyond the traditional model of inflexible business processes to a more flexible, more accessible and reusable approach known as Web services. To that end, we'll continue to see the fusion of technologies like Identity & Access Management (IAM) and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) as clients start to elevate IT security to a broader risk management discipline. Clients will start to deploy layered security controls and automated compliance controls around people and business processes and sensitive data to address various compliance regimes like SOX, PCI, Basel II, etc.

Patrick Parker, CEO of The Dot Net Factory:

With the pace of acquisitions in the fine-grained entitlement management and roles management spaces, look for the platform vendors to fold this functionality into their next-generation SOA platforms, like Microsoft's "Oslo" initiative.

Also, yesterday I promised proof that IAM is HOT HOT HOT. Well, as the ebizQ team all arrived at the Hyatt in Century City to start our two days of meetings, who was sitting right by us but one of the stars of Grey's Anatomy, Mr. McSteamy.

Is there any more proof needed that Identity and Access Management is the hot sector of security. I've included a picture of McSteamy sitting in the lobby of the IAM Summit LA just for proof. What's next, I ask: information security paparazzi?