Cloud, BYOD Increases Need for Automated IAM Systems

For instance, imagine an organization that uses Salesforce for its CRM and as well allows employee access to Salesforce through personal mobile devices. If an employee leaves the organization, IT must deprovision the employee's network access. Nevertheless it must as well shut down Salesforce access rights, or else the former employee will continue to have access to valuable customer information. For many organizations, that's however a largely time-intensive and manual process.

"First, there are the complexities of the heterogeneous computing infrastructure," he says. "This infrastructure consists of many, many applications, systems and networks. Each of those computing systems has a security model and access control in other words optimized for that specific system-and not the whole environment. Bridging those is quite difficult. And the business keeps on changing, which often results in recombination of these varied systems in a single process. Think the Automated Teller Machine, via which the simple business action of transferring money from your savings to checking account requires the integration of funds transfer, passbook savings, demand deposit and account reconciliation applications-all optimized for their specific function, not for you transferring money via an ATM."

And second, he explains, computing has grown to become the foundation for business operations, which means that near every business action affects who should have access to what resources, and what they should do with that access.