RISK AND SECURITY – DIGITAL IDENTITY AND ACCESS

RC: What do you consider to be the current challenges in the digital identity access management (IAM) space?

van den Dool: In the past, the IAM market space was traditionally dominated by global software vendors with large and varied product portfolios. These traditional solutions offered core functionality but often lacked the flexibility, interoperability and user experience required to meet the very specific and unique use cases of individual organisations. As a result, we have found that over time many organisations have implemented heavily customised, inefficient and fragmented IAM solutions that are tightly coupled with their applications and processes. Integration of business applications is often a major effort and therefore many organisations have a sub-optimal integration across their business landscape. For organisations that have grown rapidly through mergers and acquisitions, this situation is further compounded due to the inheritance of additional technical debt. In today’s IAM marketplace, there is a much wider choice of products and vendors ranging from global software players to niche vendors with a dedicated focus on IAM. The newer breed of products place a far greater emphasis on user experience, scalability, modularity, cloud integration and interoperability for addressing the needs of the digital business. When you consider the wide range of available products that address different segments of the market, combined with complex hybrid technology landscapes and increasing pressures from the business to deliver enabling IAM services, it is not surprising that many organisations struggle to holistically address IAM challenges. The temptation is for many organisations to procure new technology solutions to cater for specific business needs, but in many cases, these point solutions do not address the complex legacy challenges that still exist, resulting in suboptimal outcomes. For an IAM system to deliver optimal value to the business, IAM transformation is required. Many organisations struggle, however, to identify a means to reach this goal.

Apr-Jun 2017 Issue

Accenture

ForgeRock

Banc Sabadell Group