Identity-Management-As-A-Service

Redesigning the enterprise architecture for identity and access management (IAM) is an important task. As organizations' requirements become more complex, and to keep administrative costs down, IAM functionality needs to be increasingly externalized from business applications. When this task is completed successfully, IT and business benefits are clearly in evidence. Business benefits include deeper insight into the effectiveness of policy management, reduced operational risk, and higher compliance. IT benefits are easier administration and outsourcing of IAM functions, reduced application development cycle times through code reuse, and architectural flexibility to support mergers and acquisitions and other organizational changes. Although there are early examples of organizations gaining such benefits by adopting an identity-management-as-a-service (IDaaS) framework, organizations should look at IDaaS as a long-term strategic effort and proceed incrementally, not only with the technical implementation, but in maturing their identity related policy and management processes and strengthening interdepartmental relationships.