European Identity and Access Management Survey 2009

KPMG and Everett presented their 2009 European Identity and Access Management Survey, which suggests that although IAM seems to be an increasingly popular technology, the motivation and approach in business are rather different from education.

90% of organisations have one or more projects in the area of IAM but most of these are internally focussed on a specific business requirement. Governance, risk and compliance is by far the most common driver, with efficiency and business enablement much less often quoted. This means that many of the projects focus on the manual activities of cleaning data, defining roles, policies and processes, rather than on automation of those processes. There also appear to be difficulties in measuring the business benefits of these projects and, perhaps as a result of this, problems in getting the business (as opposed to the IT service) to engage in them. It also appears that businesses are seeking centrally controlled authorisation systems from a single supplier, so have relatively little interest in open standards: the move to adopt those seems to be coming from vendors rather than their customers.

The survey report is available at:
http://www.everett.nl/content/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=34&Itemid=760

Andrew Cormack - ISSE conference in Scheveningen, Netherlands, 6-8 October 2009 (http://www.isse.eu.com/)