Identity & Access Management (IAM) is hottest market for 2005/6

If 2005 is the year of Identity Theft, then it stands to reason that 2005 is the year of Identity and Access Management ..right? Well partly right. But there are a lot of other reasons that this is the year for IAM.

After years of being advertised as the next big thing, the identity and access management market is finally living up to the hype. Just before Christmas, Computer Associates bolstered its portfolio by grabbing Netegrity. BMC doubled the ante by buying Calendra and OpenNetwork, and even Oracle decided to take a break from acquiring application vendors when it snatched up Oblix.

What's behind the renewed interest?

First, there are those bothersome Sarbanes-Oxley Act regulations, which mandate that executives certify their financial results, lest they wind up in the pokey. But that's not all. A recent ESG Research report found that 55 percent of users surveyed believe that access control is their organization's highest security priority in relation to Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

Then there's the security angle. Some 46 percent of users in the same ESG Research survey said they had found active accounts belonging to ex-employees after auditing their networks. This is the equivalent of leaving your front door wide open while you sleep.

So it's not surprising to find renewed interest in tools that provide the ability to quickly provision accounts for new hires and deprovision accounts for problem employees. That's the point of identity and access management technology, which can restrict what a user can actually do after they log on, and audit each action.