2013 Will See Enterprise Identity Management Changes

According to a new report, 2013 Planning Guide: Identity and Privacy, by Ian Glazer, research vice president on the identity and privacy team at Gartner, major changes are coming for enterprise identity in 2013, as the latest mobile devices, Web and development protocols and cloud services take hold.

"There is a fork in the road coming," said Glazer. "Identity management can't continue on this path of incremental gains and changes because that path ends in a place that is fundamentally different than where things have to go."

The increasing implementation of new applications development protocols, social identities, mobile devices and cloud services are transgressing enterprise boundaries and erasing differences between internal and external users.

The report states that there are four trends that are essential for IT to understand in 2013:

• the rise of stateless identity
• ID standards
• dissolving internal/external boundaries
• identity assurance

"Identity being built into business services rather than a separate entity is the natural maturation of identity," said Glazer. "The enterprise can't own and can't dictate all the ways identity is coming into and going out of its network." For example, cloud services may be making API calls into enterprise systems using an externally issued ID to validate access permissions.

"It happens subtly at first, but enterprise people I am talking to are now recognizing pieces of it," he said. "They say things like 'I have this new API layer that our mobile apps will use, maybe client apps we build or apps our employees may use, but the access path looks identical.' What does this mean for identity management? It's no longer cut and dried, internal and external."

The report states that it is essential that enterprise IT re-conceptualizes the internal processes that currently lead to application authorization, provisioning, and ID creation, and the effects that external IDs have on internal processes.

"That is a tough transition," said Glazer. "It's tough to pull your head up from the static world of on-premises user management to the more dynamic world."

The report says that although some companies with make the transition in 2013, by the following year it will become mainstream. The report also says that the current authentication process of entering usernames and passwords will shift to a new recognition process. This will entail systems learning to recognize users by characteristics such as their behavior, location, or the time of day.

"Identity will be considered successful when it fades into the background and is part of other services," said Glazer. "It won't happen in one step, but we have to start making the journey." (CU) Link