On adaptive identity management
There are many identity management products and solutions on the market that supply functionalities such as provisioning, SSO, authorization, authentication, auditing, data consolidation, and so on. This is where identity management solution providers are concentrating most of their efforts in the last years.
As exposed by Joe Pato et al. in “On Adaptive Identity Management: The Next Generation of Identity Management Technologies”, this landscape must change.
An emerging priority is to deal in a flexible, fast and simple way the changes that affect businesses. These changes can be dictated by market needs, dynamic workforces, new security threats, changing legislations, etc.
So, identity management products and solutions need to evolve towards higher levels of interoperability, flexibility and capability to react to changes.
Among the emerging trends that will affect identity management the following two can be considered the most preeminent.
On-demand and adaptive infrastructures. The major IT vendors recognise that there is a growing need for enterprises and large organizations to rationalise their IT infrastructure, reduce management costs and have more flexibility and adaptability in the provision of computing resources. Instead of having to configure and manage thousands of self-standing computing devices and cope with related changes, management tools for adaptive infrastructures allocate, on demand, the required computing resources depending on needs of users, applications and services.
Ubiquitous and pervasive computing. People’s lifestyle is getting more mobile and flexible, and each person play multiple roles in different contexts and can change roles, activities, duties and responsibilities more and more frequently.
Obviously all those new trends bring with themselves some old issues that, in this new panorama, became more relevant like privacy, identity thefts and identity-based frauds, lack of control on identity information, accountability, and complexity of identity management solutions are only some of them.
In order to fulfil new trends expectation, and to mitigate related issues, we have to consider some high-level requirements as needed to be addressed for the future: integration, flexibility, context awareness, privacy management, control over identity flow, delegation of control, accountability, and simplicity are only the most relevant.
All those requirements have in common a key element: the need for flexibility and adaptability of identity management solution to changes. Changes that can be dictated by several factors and for which any delay can have serious repercussions in terms of competitiveness, security or compliance to laws.
This new generation of identity management can be called adaptive identity management, to stress its capability to quickly adapt and react to changes, both from an operational and a management perspective.
It’s interesting that I’m reporting as new trends the same Joe reported as new 6 years ago. However, let me say, this is the truth. In the last years, IAM vendors concentrate their effort on topics like role management, auditing, delegation and compliance. Few have been done on privacy management or on integration with, for example, the support of protocol like SPML and SAML, but less have been done on topic like context awareness and integration of management tools. Now, we can only wait and see what will happen!
For more details on adaptive identity management please refer to Joe white paper “On Adaptive Identity Management: The Next Generation of Identity Management Technologies” from where I have taken a lot of the idea here reported.
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Tags: adaptive identity management, change management, identity management, identity provisioning, information security, policy