ID & Access Management Key Focus Next Year for Arcot

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Driven by rising information fraud – personal, business and financial information - and regulatory compliance, Arcot Systems, providers of authentication solutions to banks, businesses and online merchants, predicts a renewed focus on identity and access management for security departments in organizations around the globe during 2008.

The company outlines 5 trends in this area for 2008:

·1. User centric ID management - more control of who goes where in the network

No longer focused purely on the perimeter and keeping people out, security and IT departments will become more focused on controlling who is accessing what information in the network.

Arcot expects to see companies introduce more detailed identity and access management policies. These will focus more stringently on user centric identity validation– looking not just at whether they have the right user name and password, but also whether they have additional online credentials that prove that they are the actual owner of the online account or have the right to access the online portal. But the validation doesn’t stop at the perimeter, it will go on to control what specific information users have access to. As such, strong authentication will become even more an integral part of the network security infrastructure and part of a consolidated identity and access management solution as companies realize that single factor password access control is outdated.

·2. Consolidation of point Identity and Access Management solutions

Many organizations are running multiple solutions for authentication, password management, identity and access management, which can expose enterprises to fraud and information leakage, with fraudsters targeting the weakest link in the solutions suite. Arcot expects many companies will want to reduce the risk of fraud and information leakage by consolidating these systems into an overarching service-oriented architecture, which will also make management of identity and access policies easier. Analysts recognize the importance of identity validation services as being essential for fighting fraud and building online reputations.

In fact being able to effectively leverage SOA models is important for identity and access management because the applications infiltrate every level of the enterprise architecture. Identity is the single common thread that permeates every application in a modern company’s application portfolio, yet so far there has been very little industry progress towards enabling large scale identity enablement through SOA and web services.

Arcot Systems