Feature Story

By PJ Bate

December 11, 2007 - Having overcome the initial hurdles of compliance, many organizations now face increasingly higher costs associated with sustaining compliance. Companies need a way to streamline key processes associated with identity and access management to sustain compliance while mitigating risk. And they want to do it in a manner that aligns their business objectives with the identity and access management (IAM) infrastructure.

Adding new employees or moving existing employees to new projects or positions compounds challenges associated with ensuring these individuals have immediate access to the right information and the systems to do their jobs.

Aligning business and technology for IAM

Deloitte & Touche LLP (Deloitte & Touche) and Sun have teamed to provide a series of offerings designed to help clients leverage their current technology investment and realize the business value of IAM.

The first of these is the Enterprise Role Lifecycle Management (ERLM) offering, a combination of services and technology that can assist clients looking to develop a technical architecture aligned with their company's business issues.

The ERLM offering provides an integrated approach designed to facilitate compliance management and reporting and to streamline user provisioning through the use of "enterprise roles." The ERLM offering integrates:

• Deloitte & Touche Role Management for Enterprises deployment methodology, used in multiple successful engagements to assist enterprises in establishing an infrastructure to manage user access via enterprise roles
  
• Sun Java System Identity Manager software the first integrated user provisioning and identity auditing solution shown to reduce the cost of managing identities both inside and outside the business while enabling sustainable and repeatable compliance
  
• Vaau RBACx software, a role management engine that supports and enables role auditing, role mining, and related reporting?pre-integrated with the Sun Java System Identity Manager to provide the reporting and auditing engine for enterprise roles

The importance of enterprise roles

To ease the burden associated with managing each person's access, the ERLM offering helps organizations create enterprise roles based on usage and policies as they pertain to functional user groups. These business-aligned roles simplify management of access rules and rights for groups of users and help management answer the important questions:

• Who is accessing what data and which applications?
• What are the users doing with their access privileges?
• How can we automatically and securely track access?

Using enterprise roles, organizations can gain visibility into the access privileges allocated to users, increasing control and insight into who has access to what resources and information. Through this enhanced visibility, organizations can manage access more securely and easily.

Formerly a marketing manager for Sun, PJ Bate now provides marketing services to technology companies wishing to extend their market reach and developing marketing communications for the technology industry.