Access Management

This article discusses about the Access Control security features that control how users and systems communicate and interact with other systems and resources. They protect the systems and resources from unauthorized access and can be components that participate in determining the level of authorization after authentication procedures has successfully completed. Although identification, authentication, authorization and accountability have close and complementary definitions, each has distinct functions that fulfill a specific requirement in the process of access control as mentioned below

Access control review: The following is a review of the basic concepts in access control:

1) Identification - Subject supplying identification information like Username, user ID, account number

This article, at a high level, gives a brief overview of CA SiteMinder.......
Web Access Management (WAM) systems are the key to enabling business over the Web while limiting security risks. A WAM system protects and controls access to web applications, records user and administrator activities, and is responsible for creating a seamless single sign-on experience for users.
CA SiteMinder is a centralized web access management system that offers authentication, policy based authorization, single sign-on, and auditing. The basic architecture of CA SiteMinder includes 2 run-time components (Agent and Policy Server) and an administration component (Administrative UI).

I have been hearing the need of robust Identity and Access Management & Governance from past several years throughout my meetings with IT directors, managers. However, at the same time I feel that it is being represented using a very complex terminologies and is difficult for a business to understand it. Based on my experience, the key ingredients of robust Identity and Access Management & Governance (IAM/G) is an integrated:

1.Identity Management

2.Access Management

3.Segregation of Duties

4.Access Recertification

5.Organizational Change

6.Closed Loop Remediation

The emergence of technologies like cloud, social, mobility, IoT and identity federation have added complex business needs and problem of giving secure, convenient access to users from access management (AM) point of view today. With increase in threat landscape, need to be always connected and requirement to govern and manage access, organizations continue to adopt either custom developed solutions, open source or commercial proprietary solutions based on access management objectives.

Read the complete report on the analysis done by us on some available open source and commercial proprietary access management solutions.