Five Themes Driving the De-Perimeterization of the Enterprise

There are a number of significant areas that are driving a sea-change in the way enterprises must think about identity management. In a nutshell we see this need manifesting via five strategic themes.

1. Collaboration & Enterprise 2.0

Organizations will continually strive to get closer to employees, consultants, customers, suppliers and partners. This has been traditionally been phone and email, but is becoming wiki’s, blogs, portals, VOIP, presence, IM, web conferencing, and even social networks. Look what happened to email without a strong identity/security layer. Unfettered peer to peer interaction will increase significantly between users.

2. Virtualization & Cloud Computing

Corporate applications will be running on virtual infrastructure that could be located in the data center or in the cloud. The benefits associated with low cost DR and reducing internal IT costs will be some of the main business drivers. The result is that developer are unaware of where the application will be deployed and more importantly cannot rely on the ‘It’s secure because I’m behind the firewall’ mentality.

3. Master Data Management

Companies are constantly striving to know more about their customers and as such will start to use MDM to link their internal customer silos and mine the data. ‘Know your customer’ will rise to a new level to support increased opportunities to up sell additional products & services, targeted advertising, etc. Unfortunately this may also result in an increased privacy issue as it creates a bigger honey pot and is very attractive to the bad guys.

4. SaaS/On Demand Business Applications

All commoditized Enterprise applications will soon be available on-demand as an alternative to on-premise. While the aura of SaaS meaning ‘no software’ will persist for a while, enterprises will eventually drive requirements for tighter integration between different SaaS vendors via SaaS mashups (e.g. CRM and Marketing) as well as between SaaS and internal IT systems. In addition Audit & Compliance will drive IT to become more involved with their SaaS vendors in relation to meeting requirements for SOX etc.

5. Increasing Internet Crime

Internet Crime is continuously on the rise and is shifting from consumer/FI focused to B2B focused. The bad guys are happy to follow the money trail even if they have to start two or three steps removed from the money. Sophisticated attacks involving web 2.0 social engineering are going to continue to appear.

The de-perimeterization of the enterprise has arrived, but most of today’s enterprise identity management technologies are ineffective at supporting this new decentralized infrastructure. The question becomes, how do you retain cost-effective control and keep the ’bad guys’ out when applications, users and the data center are becoming virtual with access from anywhere at anytime.

In my next post I will share our vision for how the Identity Meta-System and more specifically an identity layer (that supports distributed identity management) is a business imperative and can provide the framework for a decentralized identity infrastructure that can be leveraged cost effectively and securely by all organizations.