Johannesburg, 09 Feb 2006
Tough new regulatory rules, coupled with the fear of IT security breaches, have done wonders for helping drive customers to adopt identity management technologies in the past year.
Regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 have forced businesses to keep track of sensitive data.
At the same time, various technologies falling under the umbrella of identity management have started to mature. As little as six months ago, IT managers still wrestled with the question of what exactly constituted identity-driven management (IDM). Today, most understand it to be far more than just password protection. Companies are now facing not only the complexities in dealing with issues such as regulatory compliance and security but are also having to provide for company-wide collaboration between employees, partners and suppliers.
Identity systems are becoming a crucial component of applications, with corporations wanting the ability to create identities, manage those identities and, when employees leave the company, retire those identities. By automatically managing intelligent network access in this way, IDM gives enterprises more adaptability, tighter control over their networks and more productivity from their IT staff.
Network management and operation has traditionally been a technology-focused undertaking. Getting enterprise networks up and running and maintaining performance over time has required a specific focus on connection facilitation. The emphasis has been on ensuring that PCs, laptops and PDAs can connect to the network from a variety of locations. This means that the focus has been on discovering devices, making sure that they are properly configured and facilitating the linkage between those devices and the services residing on the network. Factors such as bandwidth and quality of service (QoS) needs have been largely disregarded.
This traditional model of network management and access facilitation not only hinders workforce productivity but also creates issues around the areas of network security, management, performance and operation.
A new model of network management and access facilitation is to push intelligence to the edge of the network, where users connect and policies are enforced. This means that organisations can implement intelligent network access through IDM.
IDM assists businesses in maximising network resources and improving productivity by enabling automatic configuration of the network edge through security and management policies defined in a centrally administered database. This is made possible by allowing network administrators to dynamically apply security and performance settings to network infrastructure devices based on user, location, time and other variables. The result is a unified management infrastructure and a more secure, mobile and converged network.
There have been arguments that intelligence at the edge of the network poses unmanageable complexity within the IT organisation. The line of reasoning is that it is conceptually easier to implement and manage intelligence at the core of the network versus the edge, where there are potentially thousands of ports and even more users.
However, if the configuration and desired behaviour of that intelligence is automated and the complexity remains behind the scene, network management actually becomes simpler and the user experience is enhanced.
For more information, please visit www.datacentrix.co.za.
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