Government Technology - December 2007 - (Page RH1)

ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT Identity and Access Management (IAM): Coming of Age In order to do the public’s business and trustworthy transactions of all shapes and sizes, governments need to know the answer to a central question: “Who are you?” To do that, and to meet their public missions, governments need ways to manage the identities of individuals, groups and machines at a distance and across agency or jurisdictional lines. They also need to control both how users access information in discrete computer systems, and the mechanism for system-to-system information exchange among agencies or business units. The technology industry responded with Identity and Access Management (IAM) software and services, sales of which are projected to reach $8.5 billion by 2008 (Radicati Group, 2005). On the user side, the software is designed to help enterprises prove the identity of all parties to a transaction with three key components of personal identity: • authenticating that a person is who he or she claims; • authorizing that person’s access to information in discrete systems; and, • providing a single sign-on mechanism for that person to use to access systems internally across the enterprise or to access systems in other enterprises. Add to the mix the need for a robust policy and audit framework to meet an increasingly complex regime of regulatory and compliance requirements, which have grown to include the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 and the Real ID Act of 2005. All of this takes place in the context of significant shortcomings in both the private sector (most ID management software is not interoperable) and the public sector (most agencies do not trust each other because of immature, incomplete, uneven or sometimes conflicting approaches to authentication among agencies). NEW APPROACH: FreeIPA A promising open source project called freeIPA (identity, policy and audit information) brings a standards-based, interoperable and backward-compatible approach to identity and authentication management for enterprise UNIX and Linux installations. It does so by enabling single sign-on for organizations and their users through a centralized identity and access management solution. Recognizing that enterprise IT environments are inherently heterogeneous, the pre-configured identity management application will be paired with a common centralized authentication point for formerly discrete means of access control to work together — including all Unix/Linux logins, LDAP-based application authentication applications and remote access through wireless and VPN. Such an open source solution, supported by the open source community and commercial third parties that align themselves with the community’s interests, holds the promise of collaboratively developing “a better way” toward ID management for Linux and UNIX that would: • support single sign-on; • provide tools to more efficiently manage information access and control; • be sufficiently robust to meet current compliance requirements and sufficiently nimble to adapt to regulatory changes in the future; • reduce administrative overhead and costs; • enhance security; and, • make it easy to manage identity and access control for a single enterprise (individual entity) or through a federated environment (across agency lines).

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Government Technology - December 2007

Government Technology - December 2007 Contents Point of View Big Picture Profile The Last Mile GT Spectrum Well...How Did We Get Here? Dark Spaces A Paler Shade of Green? Decertification Dilemma Game On Two Cents Products Signal:Noise

Government Technology - December 2007

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