Johannesburg, 25 Sep 2013
IT and the business sector are being virtually bombarded by many important trends - cloud adoption, increased mobility, the rise of social media, and the increasing flow of information across the extended enterprise.
The old network perimeter is no longer relevant - today's IT must deal with highly distributed identities across the entire business environment that come from many sources - applications, systems, social media, etc. Additionally, mobile employees and customers are changing the face of business, and redefining the challenge of delivering secure applications quickly to the changing user population.
These factors cause a dramatic shift in the role of security, and how user identities should be managed. Government CIOs are pressured to perform a balancing act between securing government applications while providing public servants, and citizens, with access to information via the numerous access channels available today, says Gordon Hayden, sales manager at CA Southern Africa.
For example, most South African government departments have many applications that are difficult to provision user access to. Moreover, it is complex to alter a user's access rights when they change roles and where users' access rights are still available long after they have left the department. All this poses a security risk that can best be managed using identity management.
Another aspect where an IT solution can help government is in the protection of information access via mobile platforms. With the explosion of mobile devices and the increased need to provide public servants, and citizens, with access via this channel, mobile device management is a critical solution.
Increased efficiency, accompanied by reduced cost, is first prize in any environment, but particularly when both emanate from a government department. This can be achieved by a self-service password reset solution that does not require people intervention and which can potentially bring you an ROI in approximately 20 months, depending on the number of calls and the cost of each call in the department.
* In my next article, I will discuss how applications can be secured through identity management.
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