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Identity Management from the cloud

Under a Dark Cloud

Article from ADMIN 43/2018

By Martin Kuppinger

Offers for identity management as a service (IDaaS) are entering the market and promising simplicity. However, many lack functionality, adaptability, and in-depth integration with existing systems. We look at how IT managers should consider IDaaS in their strategy.

Identity and access management (IAM) is a core IT discipline located between IT infrastructure, information security, and governance (Figure 1). For example, IAM tools help with the management of users and their access rights across systems and (cloud) services, to provide easy access to applications (preferably with a single sign-on experience), to handle strong authentication, and to protect shared user accounts.

Figure 1: Identity and access management comprises four disciplines.

IAM Complexity

IAM projects often prove to be complex. As a cross-system tool, IAM requires a connection to existing systems in many areas and, in particular, to the core area of identity provisioning (i.e., the administration of users and their user accounts on the various target systems). These tools require more than just technical connections: They also must be mapped to the correct internal system user accounts.

Other aspects, such as strong and adaptive authentication, are often complex, not in terms of technical integration with existing systems, but because of the high security requirements of this infrastructure. Systems designed to ensure security must be implemented in a secure manner. Adaptive authentication means supporting different authentication mechanisms, taking

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