As a framework for cybersecurity policies, processes and technology, identity and access management (IAM) is not new. As it evolves to meet ever more sophisticated cyber threats, what role should it play in today’s enterprise organisations? And how do IT practitioners convince business leaders that IAM ought to be at the heart of business-led projects?

These are among the questions Tech Monitor explored in a recent interview produced in association with Ping Identity. Fielding questions on behalf of Ping Identity was Adam Preis, the company’s director of product and solutions marketing. 

The interview featured topics including:

  • Ongoing relevance of identity and access management
  • Balancing operational agility with effective IAM
  • Why IAM should be at the heart of business-led projects
  • The role of AI and automation in present and future IAM

You can watch in full here:

Preis began by making the case for IAM. “Increasingly, identity has become a critical component to enable access journeys – not just in terms of securing the threat landscape but also in terms of enabling streamlined and personalised experiences,” he said. “Identity is now mission-critical to most organisations’ agendas.”

On its ongoing relevance, Preis said: “As everything has become digitised so every single touchpoint requires the user – whether it’s a consumer, worker, partner or, increasingly, machines and APIs – to authenticate themselves and be authorised into services, data and applications.” Identity, he added, “is now an end-to-end lifecycle, no longer just about logging users into a service, application or data. Rather it’s about making sure “the right user has the right level or access at the right time and with the right duration as well.”

Elsewhere in the interview, he talked about balancing access management with operational agility. “The most progressive of organisations that we engage with see that identity is also an [enabler] for digital agility agendas. They are using identity to extricate themselves from legacy identity and access management arrangements.

“If you have [a] purpose-built identity that can fulfil all your needs, then, by extension, all your development resourcing can be diverted towards creating customer-facing features. And that’s what really differentiates providers. That’s really what increases market share and drives revenue. These are all achievable business outcomes.” He noted, however, that a lot of big enterprises remain locked into to using legacy IAM. 

He said those who see the value in IAM but who often find the wider business is less enthusiastic must first identify the right stakeholders to help champion any change process. “Identity is not something that is just confined to IT departments,” said Preis; it requires a shared understanding of user journeys. “Do we really understand how users are interacting … with those services, and where are the break points, the risk points?” 

To find out more about Ping Identity visit pingidentity.com or to receive a free white paper on Securing Digital Identities in Financial Services you can register here.