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June 24, 2002
More on IDs
The sheer volume of enterprise user accounts and distributed applications creates an inescapable "vortex," forcing customers to seek ways to cut costs while automating security and efficiency, said Pete Lindstrom, senior security strategies analyst at Framingham, Mass.-based Hurwitz Group.
Automating the extended processes surrounding ID management and account provisioning can reap immediate rewards, from freeing up critical help-desk support to increased employee productivity and ROI, Lindstrom said.
This article was talking specifically about web services, but I think its true even without a web services deployment. If you're ready now, using SAML and other web services single sign-on protocols will be easy.
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Identity, Authentication, and Authorization
We're about to move to a single directory structure where I work. By July we should have unique IDs for all 22,000 workers and be able to access them from a single directory tree. No small accomplishment, but one that is too long coming. (We're using Novell's NDS and DirXML, for the curious.)
The real challenge will be to ensure that new applications are written to take advantage of this new structure and prioritizing which old applications need to be rewritten. Oh, and did I mention educating the workers?
I have a hard time believing that there are IT professionals out there who don't see the value in this, but they're there. In this age of connectedness and data sharing, I take it as an article of faith that identity, authentication, and authorization should be managed once and the results useful across the enterprise. The advantages are there to be sure, but its the disadvantages that drive this issue.
Chief among the disadvantages are security and privacy concerns. When someone leaves a job their access to sensative data should terminate as well and that doesn't happen reliably when identity and authorization are handled on an ad hoc basis. Just as Y2K issues forced IT to clean up a variety of problems (and gave them the excuse they needed to convince the boss), HIPPA is driving this issue for government and the health care industry.