Identity And Access Management Adoption In Europe: 2009

Interest in and adoption of identity and access management (IAM) technologies has been growing steadily over the past few years, fueled both by the desire to streamline processes relating to employee, contractor, partner, and customer access to company systems and by the fears that those granted access will abuse those privileges. In late 2009, Forrester asked European enterprises and SMBs about their challenges and objectives for information security, including IAM. We found that although European organizations, much like their North American counterparts, feel that IAM needs to be addressed sooner rather than later, adoption of even the most popular IAM technologies remains quite low. Hosted IAM is one potential solution to firms' adoption woes — particularly in Europe. Security and risk professionals struggling to implement IAM should take measures to understand the nascent hosted IAM marketplace, because in a few years' time IAM services will be viable alternatives to traditional products, particularly for those companies for whom startup costs and management complexity have to date been an insurmountable barrier to broader implementation of IAM.