Identity Management is at the core of the secure IT infrastructure that every company, government agency and institute of higher education strives to achieve. It is one of the most fundamental building blocks in support of any level of communication, collaboration or commerce within an organization or across the Internet.

Despite the decades of investment and hard work, many organizations face greater identity management challenges today than they did 15 years ago. Today, many organizations struggle with a hodge-podge of silo’d, poorly or non-interoperable IAM functions that are impossible to govern properly and are hindering proper risk management.

This highly actionable report supports our clients as they develop five-year technology infrastructure plans. In this report we make specific projections as to where we believe Identity Management will be going over the next five years and we describe a model for identity abstraction that provides an extensible services oriented architecture.

To provide our clients with the most comprehensive view of Identity Management, we augment our own expertise with the insights of what we consider to be the top thought leaders and industry experts to deliver the most comprehensive perspective on the Future of Identity Management.

 

At TechVision, we believe there is significant value in cutting through the hype surrounding the impact of connecting autonomous and semi-autonomous devices together in the Internet of Things (IoT). While much of the press coverage centers on the direct impact on humans (self-driving cars, automated appliances, etc.), the economic engine driving IoT are the billions of interactions we will never see. There will certainly be value derived from exposing every consumer to data-driven outcomes, but there will be significantly greater value created by putting every supply chain, production line, maintenance process, and support manager in touch with large pools of product-focused data that will cause an explosion in optimization within every industry to take place and then allow companies to both open new markets and develop new ways to deliver value to customers. In this report, we focus on the pure potential of IoT and how an enterprise may best leverage this potential.  More importantly, in this report we lay out the key challenges one must overcome before even attempting to leverage IoT.

What are the connections between identity and data in the enterprise?  When one protects identity, they are really protecting data: data that is a representation of the identity.  Unfortunately, as discussed in this new CrossTalk report by TechVision Research most organizations don’t have data management and even when they do have data management, the identity data is usually left out of the discussion. At TechVision Research we continually see data mismanagement undermining all aspects of the business function.  As Noreen Kendle has experienced “data mess-up is equal opportunity across all types of data, including identity data.”  Noreen goes on to say “I’ve seen companies overwrite big text fields with identity-related information primarily because they don’t want to stop and enhance the database schema and structures:  this includes credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc.”   Obviously, this is a huge privacy issue because the fields are not identified as identity fields and the IT staff is oblivious to the situation. Bill Bonney speaks from experience building an IdM practice as he “agrees that overloading is an issue.”  But, as Bill likes to point out, “It’s not just overloading, it’s making assumptions about what is in a field and assumptions about how the field is evaluated and before you know it you have sub-processes built up around a falsely validated field.”  This establishes a false foundation that eventually causes the entire trust chain to break.   As Bill states, “inevitably, someone will use the data based on how it was first created (the field label of record).” This is a symptom of a far greater problem.  There is a huge assumption made by IT staff and the identity management tools they use that the data fields are accurately representing the data stored in the field.  This just isn’t so! Given this reality of identity and data mismanagement in the enterprise, this report focuses on the following key concerns:

 

• The evolution of identity data as its own domain
• The impact of silos on identity data management
• The potential of virtual directories as an identity data management approach
• The impact of data reuse on identity and the resulting authenticity decay
• Identity data governance: is built on a foundation of quicksand

There are things organizations can be doing today to address these concerns.  Specifically, this report discusses a five-step program for identity data governance based upon the team’s experience working with data and identity in F1000 enterprise.