RSA Takes Identity Management to New Heights

Recently I visited Singapore for RSA Conference APJ, which involved passing through immigration and customs. I realized – perhaps as a byproduct of jet lag – that border control is in many ways an identity management issue.

Like Information Security teams, border control needs to prevent unknown entry, validate who is entering (via authentication), and have visibility and control of what people are authorized to do while in the country (i.e. – Are you a short-term tourist? Are you permitted to work here?). This has gotten more difficult for border control teams as the volume and type of visitors has increased, as has pressure to ensure security. New high-tech immigration kiosks have been brought in to automate some of this by scanning passports and photographing lower-risk individuals so that the staff can focus on the more complex work that needs their attention. Airport Image_IMG Launch

Similarly, private organizations’ identity management requirements have changed, and in today’s era of big data, mobile, cloud, and social media, have gotten significantly more complicated, with heightened threats, strict regulatory requirements, and demanding business users. And yet, their goal is still to efficiently enable trusted interactions between identities and information resources.

Today, RSA launched the latest release of the RSA Identity Management and Governance (IMG) solution to help organizations confidently achieve this goal, and transform IAM into an enabler for a faster and more secure business. RSA IMG takes aim at three key ways in which organizations can deliver a strong Identity Management program:

  1. Identity Lifecycle Management — Streamlined self-service user registration allows business users to create accounts and choose access rights for themselves, new employees and contractors. The UI automatically enforces policies while suggesting entitlements based on similar users. Automated approval workflows and provisioning ensures that user access is delivered rapidly, while maintaining compliance with process and policy requirements.
  2. Data Access Governance. – With an increase in both data breaches and compliance requirements, it is critical to extend access governance to data as well as applications. RSA IMG is designed to provide ubiquitous support across all major file systems (and SharePoint) providing one place to centrally manage and govern the access to all data. RSA IMG leverages identity context and data attributes (such as user access frequency) to establish a line-of-business owner for data resources.
  3. Provisioning 2.0 — RSA IMG is engineered to take a governance-driven approach dramatically simplifying application onboarding, and enabling organizations to automate many more applications. For example, one customer of ours in the transportation industry reduced application onboarding time by approximately 75%!

We are really proud of this latest version of RSA IMG and its ability to meet today’s security, compliance and business requirements, while enabling faster, more agile, and more secure business. Like those immigration kiosks at the airport, leveraging newer technology can accelerate important business processes without sacrificing security or compliance.

Data Access Governance Infographic

About the Author: Jason Garbis