Gartner: Identity and Access Intelligence

by Earl Perkins, Gartner

- IT has been too busy keeping the IAM fires burning, or putting them out to really add value to the business. We have all the potential sources for this intelligence. We are sitting on a gold mine of intelligence.

- Unless you (IT) can provide actionable intelligence for business decision making, go home.

- IAI is part of a broader spectrum of enterprise security intelligence. So you have to know your place.

- Who benefits from the convergence of IAI and BI (business intelligence) is the customers.

- IAI’s core responsibility to the business is accountability of access to critical resources and the transparency to see it.

- We can justify IAM through intelligence. You can justify your presence and your relevance via identity and access intelligence.

- Gartner’s strategic planning assumption: “Through 2013, notable IAM project failures will cause 50% of all companies to shift IAM efforts to intelligence, not administration.”

- Current IAM projects are difficult to justify as efficiency efforts alone. I totally agree with this!

- Cloud computing security concerns increase the value of log and repository information.

- Privacy concerns will hinder aggressive use of IAI

- We’ve moved from what I used to call triple-A (administration, authentication and authorization) to IAAA: Intelligence, administration, authentication and authorization.

- Someone needs to have a global understanding of all the data, schemas and key repositories being collected in the business and through IAM. SAP has done a lot of work here according to Earl.

- Adjacent IAI influences and influencers include SIEM, GRC, IT GRC, BPM, NAC, BI, DLP – enough acronyms yet?!

- IAI can bring the who view to SIEM, for example. This is something ArcSight (HP) did.

- IAI is about helping to say what will happen. Not what happened and more than why did it happen.

This session was a great follow-on from this morning’s keynote by Bill Hossmann. Earl took it a double-click deeper though. It’s really important to be looking at the identity and access management systems in the light of the business versus just the IT group. Will this be more difficult? Absolutely. Throw in cloud data and you can see how deep this water can get. This is definitely graduate school for IAM!!! And, as Earl stated, this is a 5-10 year vision. It is not going to be accomplished overnight.

(click on the pictures below to get the full view)




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