Hitachi ID Systems Helps Organizations Eliminate IAM Silos

Solutions streamline authentication management and bridge identity and access management across corporate and cloud infrastructures

CALGARY, July 14 /PRNewswire/ - Hitachi ID Systems Inc., a leading provider of identity and access management (IAM) solutions, addresses key market requirements to manage identities, entitlements and authentication factors while ensuring network security, improving user productivity and reducing IT costs.

The need to meet compliance and audit requirements through robust authentication and authorization has supported IAM market growth despite the economic downturn. In a February 2010 report, "Market Trends: Identity and Access Management Market, Worldwide 2007-2013," Gartner estimated the growth in IAM budgets at eight percent. It forecasts that the IAM market will grow to $12 billion by 2013, with an average compound annual growth rate of seven percent.

TOP MARKET TRENDS

TREND: Vendor consolidation

The IAM market has gone through a major consolidation, which can be quite problematic for customers for a number of reasons:

    -   Evaluating the viability of vendors is difficult, as evidenced by the
        recent acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle.
    -   Over-reliance on a few, large vendors can put customers in a weak
        bargaining position when vendors retire products, increase prices or
        reduce support staff.
    -   Large vendors may be slow to respond to evolving customer needs
        because their engineering resources are tied up with integrating
        acquired technologies.

In its most recent "Magic Quadrant for Using Provisioning" report, Gartner asserted that customers must respond to these pressures by understanding that there is no "one-size-fits-all solution." They must look beyond brand and instead evaluate their options based on key differentiators that include:

    -   Price, including flexibility of pricing for deployment, maintenance
        and support programs;
    -   Delivery time of projects to meet business needs;
    -   The need for and cost of custom development; and
    -   Other customer experiences, including satisfaction with installed
        provisioning systems.

Hitachi ID solutions are attractively priced and require less consulting to deploy than competitors, making them an attractive option for organizations seeking an alternative to products from Sun/Oracle, CA or IBM.

TREND: Passwords continue to be the primary authentication technology

Organizations deploying technologies, such as smart cards or one-time password tokens continue to use passwords and PINs as one of a two-or-three-factor authentication strategy. Consequently, the need to manage passwords remains, despite predictions by smart card and biometric vendors that passwords will soon disappear.

Many vendors are offering password- and PIN-reset systems with their products. This includes self-service PIN reset from smart card and tokens and self-service encryption key recovery from full-disk encryption providers. The proliferation of these point solutions has caused some organizations to deploy redundant password- and PIN-reset systems that are costly and user-unfriendly.

In its May 2010 report, "What's the Password: Taking Control of Identity Access Management," Deloitte cited a study in which almost eight percent of computer users surveyed employed the passwords "123," "password," or "letmein." Given the continued prevalence of passwords, this demonstrates that secure and efficient password management is more important now than ever.

Hitachi ID Password Manager (formerly P-Synch) is the industry's first and only integrated platform for managing all authentication factors. It allows organizations to consolidate the management of passwords, security questions, biometric samples, smart cards, OTP tokens and full-disk encryption keys.

TREND: Strong interest in cloud computing and software-as-a-service

Whether they are using an internal IAM system to manage identities and entitlements on a cloud-hosted application or moving the IAM infrastructure itself into the cloud, many organizations are exploring the interaction between cloud computing and IAM.

"Increasingly, the conversation is turning to moving IAM systems from an internally hosted platform to an externally hosted system run by a service provider and connected over the public Internet," said Idan Shoham, Hitachi ID Systems CTO. "Our IT outsourcing partners have been doing that for years, in a multi-tenant arrangement."

According to Gartner's February 2010 Market Trends report, "purchase of IAM functionality delivered as a SaaS is expected to accelerate over the coming years. This is confirmed by a Gartner survey showing 27 percent of the businesses interviewed during IAM summits pointing to an expected increase in spending on SaaS IAM products by year-end 2011."

The Hitachi ID Management Suite includes connectors to popular cloud-hosted applications such as WebEx and Google Applications with more integrations added regularly.

TREND: Internal controls continue to be the key driver for IAM projects

Whether driven by regulatory compliance or audit requirements, many IAM projects are funded to address a specific internal-controls requirement. This leads to investment in privileged password management, segregation of duties enforcement, access certification, role-based access control, automated de-provisioning and more.

As Gartner found in its survey of the market, "Beside compliance requirements influencing demands for IAM, audit and analytics requirements appear as the significant drivers highlighted. The current economic environment is likely to be influencing this trend, with demands for better auditing and analysis to help establish performance benchmarks."

The Hitachi ID Management Suite includes a rich set of features designed to meet internal controls requirements. This includes randomizing privileged account passwords and controlling access to those accounts, defining roles and enforcing compliance between actual and role-based entitlements, periodically reviewing and cleaning up user entitlements and more.

TREND: Many IAM projects continue to fail or run over-budget

Many enterprise user provisioning and identity management projects continue to struggle. This is due to a variety of problems, including:

    -   Organizations failing to engage appropriate business stake-holders;
    -   Unrealistic expectations due to over-optimistic vendor promises;
    -   Technology challenges - including scalability, reliability and
        hard-to-use products; or
    -   Failure to incorporate user adoption in project plans.

Clearly, the market is ready for something better.

The Hitachi ID Management Suite includes many built-in connectors, request and approval screens, workflow processes and reports. This significantly reduces the cost of deployment and project risk.

About Hitachi ID Systems, Inc.

Hitachi ID Systems, Inc. is a leading provider of identity management solutions. Hitachi ID Management Suite has been licensed by hundreds of mid- to large-sized organizations worldwide. Hitachi ID Systems' solutions enable organizations to effectively manage every aspect of the user lifecycle. Hitachi ID Management Suite includes Identity Manager, Password Manager and Privileged Password Manager.

Trade names of other companies used in this announcement are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of appropriate companies.

SOURCE Hitachi ID Systems Inc.