I’m just beginning to dive into a new research area around Identity and Access Management (IAM) in the enterprise, and am brushing up on the main challenges, opportunities and contenders in the space.The premise around IAM seems simple enough – make sure people are who they say they are, and give them access to the appropriate data and services they need.This area is particularly interesting to me because I see the future of work and collaboration generally becoming a more non-hierarchical, self-organizing and fluid thing, where ad-hoc relationships are formed for temporary projects and then dissolved. Individuals will need to quickly be authenticated, assigned roles, given access to sensitive information, monitored, and then deprovisioned. Ideally, the majority of this process would be automated.For the individual in this scenario, who would most likely be logging in to a multitude of web-based applications and accounts across a range of personal devices, a federated identity solution would be in order.And all of this would also require security, compliance and trust solutions for the cloud, standards such as SAML and OAuth to accelerate integration, as well as standards for auditing and reporting.

These seem to essentially be the main challenges being faced now in the enterprise, so I’m curious to find out how providers stack up.

I see the next phase of the web being dependent upon our ability to not only authenticate and authorize identities, but to contextualize them with supplemental information around trust, reputation, influence and endorsement – a layer of granularity that has yet to be fully realized yet.

1. ActivIdentity