Identity and Access Management IAM encompasses the business processes, rules and systems involved in the management of people and their access to information and other corporate assets. It is a key task to establishing accountability and increasing usability amongst an organisation’s workforce. Not surprisingly, it is one of the most common issues that come up during audit exercises.

As organisations grow and expand, the process for managing access to resources tends to grow in parallel. Over time these processes become fragmented, making the management of staff and their access privileges complex, identification of fraud difficult and reporting on access privileges a herculean task. It doesn’t help as well that there tends to be a proliferation of systems and applications with access granted to customers and partners. The accumulated effect of this is that it becomes difficult to prevent fraud and misuse of assets, especially where there is lack of visibility of disparate systems.

Identification, Authentication and Authorisation forms the core of IAM as these are the main technologies that can be used to enforce the following main objectives;

• Protect sensitive and valuable information
• Strong User Authentication
• Demonstrate compliance
• Physical and logical access control
• Managing multiple identities
• Eliminate Identity theft

Single Sign-On or Reduced Sign-On allows organisations to reduce costs through automation of business rules, self service and lower helpdesk costs. One single benefit of this is the reduction or eliminating of shared passwords and use of simple passwords. We have worked with lots of organisations to review and streamline their joiners, leavers and movers process, reducing their exposure to the risks around accumulated and elevated privileges.

It is clear from the variety of works that we have done that users require different strong authentication options depending on their role and the criticality of the asset or resource they are trying to access. We always seek to get the

We also have good knowledge and experience of designing and implementing two factor authentications systems and other string authentication such as biometrics. Our understandings of these technologies include new emerging technologies using software tokens, token less text based authentication systems. Where necessary we can deploy a combination of these authentication systems as dictated by business requirements such as specific needs, budgets and working practice.