Gartner has today pointed the way forward for the identity and access management (IAM) sector with a set of predictions it expects to shape the market between now and 2011.
The analyst house has taken a strong line on the role of hosted identity services saying that by 2011, hosted IAM and IAM delivered as a software service will account for 20% of vendor revenues.
“A growing percentage of the revenue realised by IAM vendors and service providers will be made possible by the next step in the IAM maturity model, toward hosted IAM and IAM as a service” it said.
Not every vendor will accept every aspect of the latest market assessment, however.
Mike Small, lead security consultant at CA said that while vitally important, he accepts that IAM is not a core competency and hosting does offer a massive opportunity to reduce expenditure. But he cautions, “While you can outsource some of the technology and process to do with managing identities, you cannot outsource full responsibility”.
“Approval and attestation of access rights – about who should have which rights to perform which tasks – must remain in house” Small said.
Identity-aware networking for the enterprise is another forecast that has been chalked up for development, as a means of blocking access to resources that a user is not authorised to use.
Gartner reckons that monitoring user behaviour and enforcing access based on a user’s identity is a better approach to safeguarding networked assets than current IP address controls.
“By 2011, 30% of large corporate networks will become ‘identity aware’ by controlling access to some resources via user-based policies.”
