Identity management programmes are said to help enterprises save costs and boost security. In an online environment where enterprises are prone to internal and external intrusions, such solutions provide a good layer of protection. Rozana Sani talks to Sun Microsystems Asia South’s software professional services director Bernard Ong to find out more.

Ong points out that the right IdM solution will lead to a better managed identity lifecycle and greater security for the organisation.

MANDATORY regulations are pushing organisations to make compliance initiatives a repeatable and sustainable part of their business. As access controls are often at the top of an auditor’s list, more organisations are turning to identity compliance solutions to help with the automation and enforcement across their heterogeneous environments of applications, platforms, databases and directories.

But many are perplexed as to which identity management (IdM) solution would be right for the organisation and what specific benefits can be reaped from it.

According to Sun Microsystems Asia South’s software professional services director Bernard Ong, making the right choice will enable organisations to comply with their security policies. This will lead to a better managed identity lifecycle and greater security for the organisation.

“The size of the organisation is not a critical factor in deploying IdM. It is about the critical business drivers such as managing employee lifecycle, adherence to compliance policies and creating an environment of trust, and building trust between business partners and customers.

“Certifying access across the enterprise is a distributed task that involves business line managers and application owners. To ensure accuracy and effectiveness, users need a business context for the fine-grained IT entitlements that define access for individuals,” he said.

IdM, Ong explained, puts organisations in the lead when it optimises business processes by streamlining and simplifying the process of managing user identities across a variety of applications to provide provisioning and secure access, ensure ongoing compliance and enable sharing beyond boundaries.

“In the online global economy, it’s more important to protect sensitive enterprise data from internal and external security threats. Sun’s IdM, for example, reduces risks and provides centralised control for secure operations by providing superior, integrated user provisioning and identity synchronisation services, secure access management and highly available, scalable, manageable and secure directory services.

“With Sun’s IdM solutions, customers will be able to manage their organisation’s identity lifecycle in an automated fashion and achieve compliance continuously, lowering cost, increasing efficiency and lowering the possibility of mistakes in managing identities,” he said.

He added that Sun’s continued focus on delivering open, standards-based IdM solutions enables the company to offer customers market-leading technology to meet their biggest challenges today such as security and compliance, business process integration and new online business models.

“Sun’s IdM software portfolio enables customers to protect their existing investment because it supports multiple operating systems and is integrated, flexible and interoperable. It is designed with a unique, non-invasive architecture which offers reduced complexity and a lower cost of integration and management, allowing customers to apply more time and expertise to pursue business growth and opportunities.

“The IdM software will help to reduce risks associated with access control and facilitate successful identity audits by monitoring actual access against defined security policies and automating the existing manual access certification processes,” Ong said.