Managing the Business of Identity

By Mark McClain CEO & Founder, SailPoint

In the past three years, identity management has evolved beyond the IT department, and is now on the radar of business executives looking to address security and compliance issues through identity governance. Historically focused on the efficiencies gained from provisioning and password management, identity management today has become a cat's cradle of issues that are front-and-center with executive management and corporate boards. The urgency to address the risk of privacy breaches, fraud or misuse of IT assets has created a new set of identity management challenges that go far beyond what enterprises were facing several years ago.

Today, many companies are approaching these challenges using either provisioning or homegrown solutions, which can be costly. These solutions lack three fundamental capabilities to adequately allow large enterprises to manage the identity data of as many as several hundred thousand employees with access to hundreds of applications:

1. Visibility across critical information for the entire enterprise. Previous generations of identity management technologies are siloed by nature, focusing on specific applications, and as a result only provide a fragmented view of identity data.
2. Business context for access privileges, including implications of access to multiple applications with sensitive data. Because identity management solutions were originally created for IT and security users, they're void of business intelligence, business relevance and context, leading to inaccurate decisions and rubber-stamping.
3. Integration with existing solutions. Global enterprises have multi-vendor environments that were designed to address a myriad of challenges, but don't provide the enterprise-wide intelligence and analytics needed to identify an organization's vulnerabilities associated with user access.

Identity governance is the emerging category within identity management that brings a solution that provides benefits for both business people and IT teams. Now, organizations are approaching identity management as a cross-department, enterprise discipline that provides a layer of intelligence to give enterprises the business insights needed to strengthen IT controls and reduce the risk associated with user access to sensitive data and applications.

Last week at Digital ID World, SailPoint launched SailPoint IdentityIQ 3.0, the first comprehensive identity governance solution designed to give organizations the ability to ensure compliance and assess risk. It complements existing identity management investments, like provisioning and entitlement management, and is designed to meet the distinct needs of business owners, IT and security, and the IT auditors. To learn more about the emergence of this new category, register for our upcoming webinar What's Identity Got to Do with GRC? on September 24 @ 1 p.m. CT.

Smooth sailing,

Mark McClain
CEO & Founder
SailPoint