• Identity and Access Intelligence: Making IAM Relevant to the Business
• E. Perkins
• 14 January 2011
• Identity and access intelligence elevates identity and access management to a relevant discipline by leveraging business intelligence practices to enhance the usefulness of IAM data.

• Overview
• Identity and access management (IAM) systems or components produce data about identity and access repository information, events and actions. That intelligence is key to IAM excellence, and to enriching business intelligence (BI) for some decisions and insight.

• Key Findings
• Identity and access intelligence (IAI) is an overlapping and complementary approach with enterprise security intelligence (ESI). It provides business-level transparency to (and an understanding of) identity and access information and events.
• IAI depends on some non-IAM and adjacent technologies to add value to the intelligence – for example, data loss prevention (DLP).
• To date, IAI has been focused on enhancing IT's ability to deliver identity administration and access, rather than on delivering direct business value.
• Regulatory compliance is the earliest form of IAI that directly addresses business decision making.
• IAI is a key element to strengthen customer and partner relationships, and it is a cornerstone to cloud security governance.

• Recommendations
• Identify BI owners in the enterprise, and establish communications with BI owners and users.
• Model existing BI architecture and organization to determine gaps in intelligence gathering, analysis and reporting.
• Establish an intelligence "skill set" in the IAM team with requisite training. Create a matrix relationship between IAI and BI organizations for cross-training.
• Identify the repositories and logs in use by IT that support IAI, including those that are not part of IAM systems.
• Modify process and data collection to establish a formal IAI process and organization.

• Strategic Planning Assumptions
• Through 2013, notable IAM project failures will cause 50% of companies to shift IAM efforts to intelligence, not administration.

Omnitech Content

• Omnitech Opening Interview
• Team spirit. This is the way to navigate the stormy Information & Communication Technology Ocean, travelling with confidence through known paths and bravely dealing with new seas. This spirit, coming from a strong collaboration at all company levels, is the Omnitech specialty, the Italian system integrator based in Rome and Milan. Omnitech (born in 2007) in just four years carved out a considerable position in the Italian Security market.

• IAG (Identity & Access Governance)
• The dynamicity and speed of data growth, the improvement of the easiness in accessing and retrieving information and a consequent data availability at any time, are the principal reasons of the explosion of the operational risks related to this data access on one side, and the proliferation of regulamentations and compliance rules needed to mitigate these risks itself. Compliance rules are requested to preserve data integrity and privacy and, at the same time, to guarantee the Company reputation on the markets and on direct customers.
  
  To check who is accessing data and information, how these are managed and used is a very important issue for any kind of Company, regardless of his size. To achieve this goal you need of flexible tools but first of all of a well defined Identity and Access Governance process able to manage the digital identity lifecycle, providing awareness and proof of who is doing what.

• IAI (Identity & Access Intelligence)
• The constant proliferation of information, the digital data booming, the spread of broadband bandwith and wi-fi network, are realities that enterprises can't ignore. Very frequently data are used and shared with unsecured electronic spreadsheet, word document, videos and images according to their easiness of creation and diffusion.
  
  These unstructured data most of the time belong to "mission critical" applications and process and very frequently contain sensitive information that need to be protected to ensure privacy. Enterprises, regardless of their size, need to check who is accessing what, what kind of data and for critical application to monitor in real time the data accesses.
  
  To achieve these goals you need to use comprehensive solutions able to perform real-time intelligence activities and at the same time an identity governance model to manage identity lifecycle. The combination of these two aspects provides to enterprises the right method to have an holistic approach to Identity and Access Intelligence.

• Success Story GSE S.p.A.
• The adoption of a centralized user identity management platform, permits GSE (Gestore Servizi Energetici) S.p.A. to improve the time needed to activate the User-ID, to improve the management of the application data access roles and profiles, according to the required compliance rules.
  
  An important project assigned by GSE to Omnitech, via competitive tender.