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The past ten years have produced a substantial number of IT success stories, new innovations, visions and expectations. Nowadays the IT wave has settled down a little bit, and the organizations are sensibly evaluating how the various technologically innovative systems can be integrated together.
The current trend is to analyze the effectiveness of the IT systems, and plan changes in IT environment as well as in business processes that will make the existing investments more profitable. The IT security requirements are also getting more and more strict in the present day world.
What is Identity Management and How Does it Help in Integration
Identity Management is the who, what, where, when, why, and even how of the
IT infrastructure. It is a comprehensive set of solutions used to identify users in a system and control their access to resources by associating user privileges and restrictions with their verified identity.
Identity Management is a relatively new topic and the experience and knowhow is not too abundant. Still, the organizations have the need to resolve the identity management issues in the coming future. Identity Management takes control of the preceding slow, expensive and error-prone manual processes for user creation, granting access rights and defining user roles.
Cost Control
Common architecture
Improved processes
IT security
HelpDesk costs
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Risk Management
Organizational changes
Auditing requirements
Regulatory compliance
Privacy laws
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Business Enabler
Service Business
Mergers and acquisitions
Outsourcing
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Process Efficiency
Process control
Positive user experience
24x7 service level
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Table 1. Identity Management affects several IT related issues in organizations.
Typical Issues that Requires Identity Management
- Old employee user ids and their access rights still active
- Fast set up of user ids, access rights, roles and tools for new employees
- Review and follow-up of access rights and auditing not done
- Revising and removing access rights too slow
- User passwords missing
The implementation of Identity Management can be simply an established Single Sign-on methodology. The normal question asked from the supplier: "Have you got SSO in your product?" The revised question would be: "Which Single Sign-on technology does your product support and has been tested with?" The right question and carefully implemented SSO environment is not workstation or software dependent, but a solution covering the needs of the users, administration and the mobile users, and working application independently.
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