Review of identity and access management systems

Identity and access management is rapidly becoming the top business issue asorganizations look to increase security, reduce risk and decrease operational costs. In order toevaluate adequately the emerging maze of technologies brought forward by variousvendors it is necessary to critically analyze many aspects of the identity related securityterms and techniques. The emerging development of techniques assisting in theconsolidation of dispersed yet somewhat related Identity components across theenterprise-wide systems could very well reduce the cost of management, while increasingthe control over enforcement of governing Compliance and internal security policies. Butas always there may be tradeoffs that could damage the organization if not plannedproperly. The fascinating fact is that Identity Management is 80% politics and business and 20%technology. Identity Management is a set of processes and supporting infrastructure for thecreation, maintenance and use of digital identities (unique ids, attributes, credentials, entitlements.This paper aims to discuss what Identity Management means in the context of InformationTechnology and to provide an over view of the important components that makeup IdentityManagement Systems.