Today, identity management is a lot more. Oh, it's still got the muscle to guard the gate. But given the right set up, the bouncer at your IT door has got as much brain power as brawn. The trick is to let the bouncer use it!

Identity management solutions have evolved to encompass all of the processes, practices, and tools utilized to govern the complete lifecycle of digital identities. They now provide a variety of important functions to consolidate identity information and centralize identity management while automating identity, password, and compliance management tasks.

Identity management solutions can consolidate identity information into a single identity data repository, greatly simplifying management. This information presents a comprehensive, consolidated view of users. As a result, IT can use this to answer the fundamental question, "Who are the users?"

Centralizing identity management tasks is also important. This lets IT control and enforce access privileges from a central point based on roles and business policies. IT can then answer the question, "Who has access to what?" Centralization helps increase administrator productivity because administrators no longer have to juggle multiple user accounts on different systems.

That's not all: a well-architected identity management solution should automate user administration and access provisioning through automated rule- and role-based management of user accounts on enterprise systems. This grants access to new users based on their roles in the organization. It also grants immediate role-based access to newly deployed IT resources. In addition, this provides the capability to change user access rights when users change roles. Furthermore, it revokes access when users terminate their relationships with the organization. Yes, the identity management solution watches the IT door very carefully.