Identity & access management (IAM) - Understanding your risks and support

“Your IAM infrastructure must be tough to crack, but easy to use and maintain. It must comply with a host of regulations and auditing needs, be infinitely scalable, and evolve rapidly to meet new needs.”  Gartner:  Opening the Right Doors to the Right People (July 2007) Tough to crack, but flexible and easy to use and maintain

Logica’s Risk and Benefit Scan provides a fast and cost effective way to understand the risks and
benefits associated with the way you manage your employees, customers and partners identities
and access to files and buildings.

We can show you how to personalise your IAM strategy to:

• comply with Legislation and prove it.
• fight fraud and misuse of assets
• protect sensitive and valuable information
• protect your brand from highly public data loss scandals
• reduce costs through automation of business rules, self service and lower demand for helpdesk

IAM encompasses the business processes, rules and systems involved in the management of
people and their access to information and other corporate assets such as buildings. Over time
these processes and systems have become fragmented, making the management of staff and their access privileges complex, and the early identification of fraud almost impossible.  This is further complicated by the extension of access to customers, partners and contractors.

The consequences of getting your corporate IAM strategy wrong are increasingly front page news.  An effective solution:

• ensures compliance with legislation (and the ability to prove compliance), such as Sarbanes-Oxley, avoiding overseas trading problems and personal criminal liability.
• limits the opportunity for fraud or misuse of company assets, mainly through automating and enforcing your existing business rules.
• reduces the risk associated with staff or exemployees accessing sensitive or valuable information.
• enables a rapid company wide response to changes in individual access rights.
• makes it much harder for unauthorised users to access data and systems through stronger authentication.
• protects your brand from consumers increasingly concerned about the security of their personal information.

Because managing business rules, identities and access rights crosses multiple departments and systems, many organisations do not know, or can not quantify the risks they are exposed to.
Surprisingly, implementing an IAM strategy can also create a number of direct cost and efficiency savings generated through automation, staff self-service and reduced IT support and helpdesk.

Based on our experience of major IAM implementations, Logica has created a short Risk & Benefit Scan to benchmark and quantify your corporate exposure.

What is IAM?
Identity and Access Management is a common term used to describe an enterprise wide approach to the management of the identities of your stakeholders, and their access rights to
information and buildings. IAM solutions will often include:

Identity Management: the automated creation, management, and deletion of user accounts.
This includes the workflow for the required approvals and changes. For example, the appearance of a new joiner in the HR database may trigger a workflow to create a basic network account and an account in the ERP system. An identity management system can detect policy violations such as dormant accounts, active accounts belonging to former employees, and violations (and therefore enforcement) of business rules around separation of duties.

Single Sign On: the simplification of the user authentication process by ensuring that the user
only knows (and types) one password for multiple applications.

Two Factor Authentication (2FA): the reduction of fraud associated with simple authentication by
a password. Typical implementations use a biometric factor (e.g., fingerprint) or a physical token such as a smart card as a second authentication factor. Logica, and our partner Arcot, can also offer a proven 2FA software solution, more secure than hardware, and at a fraction of the cost.

Benefits
The advantages of implementing IAM include:

• Improved compliance through better control and enhanced accountability.
• A faster, hassle-free user experience through self-service, single sign-on, and automation.
• Improved efficiency through faster and cheaper identity maintenance.
  • Less lost productivity due to faster provisioning of joiners and faster reaction to changes.
  • Cheaper maintenance due to automation and business process streamlining.
  • Reduced helpdesk and support costs due to streamlining and self-service.
  • Reduced operational risk due to improved security and tighter control.
• Improved flexibility: it becomes easier to adapt to change.

Interested in finding out more, contact us at: 
Telephone: 0845 602 6753 or Email: security@logica.com