Published on the 20/05/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
Enterprise enthusiasm for cloud computing and mobile access are prompting a rethink of approaches to identity and access management…
According to Andre Durand, CEO and chairman of Ping Identity, said that traditional approaches to identity management relied on the user and the application sitting behind the enterprise firewall. Since that was no longer the case there needed to be a federated approach to identity management so that users could be authenticated to use a wide variety of applications from wherever they were located.
Durand said that adding biometrics into the mix, which could help address issues associated with weak passwords, could also strengthen identify management.
Ping sells identity and access management (IAM) solutions that give customers and employees one-click access to any application from any device, and its technology has been deployed by companies in Australia and New Zealand including Telstra, Macquarie Bank and NZPost. Internationally users include Disney, Boeing and Cisco.
Demand for IAM is rising rapidly. TechNavio analysts have forecast that the global market for such services will rise by 12.9 percent a year until 2019.
Government is expected to be a particularly enthusiastic adopter of IAM as it seeks to provide services and access to information to authenticated citizens. The Australian Government has already canvassed the notion of a central authentication service potentially similar to New Zealand’s RealMe.
In the US Ping and ForgeRock are the first two companies to be integrated with the US Government’s Connect.Gov service to handle identity management.
Durand confirmed that he had this week met with a number of Government chief information officers about how best to tackle identity management issues and was planning to meet with Australian Government representatives in Canberra today.
Mike Ellis, CEO of ForgeRock has also visited Australia and New Zealand this week where the company runs a team of around 12 staff. The company supplies the identity management smarts behind New Zealand’s RealMe initiative and has also supplied identity management platforms for Norway, Belgium and the Vatican.
ForgeRock sells open source IAM solutions, but extends access management to devices in what it terms Identity Relationship Management.
Ellis said that the company was working with a number of organisations including WeightWatchers, Phillips and Toyota on identity and access management solutions that, for example, linked the identity of a car with the identity of its owner, so that when they were both connected to Toyota’s service cloud it was possible for all the information relating to that relationship to be gathered together securely.
He said that being able to create this broader identity based relationship allowed corporations to potentially create new categories of services delivered over the internet both to individuals, and the devices they owned that were also connected.
