The global market for identity and access management (IAM) is on fire as mobility, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) adoption and increasingly complex cloud infrastructure become adopted. The cloud is playing a major role in shaping the future of IAM and how solutions will be delivered and implemented.
According to a Research and Markets report, the global market for IAM, both cloud and premise based, reached $5.13 billion last year. But perhaps even more shocking is that the market is expected to more than double by 2018, reaching $10.39 billion. The report cited increased enterprise mobility, strengthened regulatory mandates and a rise in the adoption of web-based applications as the main drivers of the IAM market. And the top solution developers in the space include CA Technologies, IBM, Oracle, Dell-Quest Software EMC, Hitachi ID systems and Microsoft.
CA has been a major player in the IAM space for years, providing software and SaaS solutions to help secure data and identities and transform infrastructure to meet the demands of the cloud. The company has some very clear ideas about the direction the IAM market will take this year and what that will mean for security professionals.
"We believe that the technology trends of cloud, mobile and social will continue to heavily influence the direction and need for IAM in 2014, but we also see new business demands and enabling technologies joining in to put a twist on the IAM and security path for many organizations," said Mike Denning, senior vice president and general manager, security business, CA Technologies.
According to CA, a software-defined, open enterprise will play an integral role in shaping the face of the IAM market this year. As enterprises move toward the cloud and managed services, each IT layer becomes a platform for developers to create new services on. Enterprises will be increasingly forced to open up application and infrastructure as data centers and cloud services become intertwined with every facet of their business. The result will be increased speed to innovation for developers and a need for traditional IT departments to utilize IAM to protect and secure access to the building blocks of development.
CA also predicts that hardware elements within mobile devices will become an important component of IAM, particularly as users adopt new mobile devices in shorter amounts of time. Device manufacturers will begin to build security systems on top of hardware security technologies to address BYOD challenges and enable secure ways for users to access corporate and personal data and applications. CA believes phones will begin to act as a primary and secure means of proving identity and authenticating users.
Another interesting trend will involve the lack of scalable identity proofing, which creates challenges as more and more users enroll in online services. The industry will need to partner even more closely to provide scalable identity proofing that meets the needs and mandates dictated by digitization as well as exposure to both public and private records.
Marketing will play an important role in IAM initiatives, with CMOs helping to provide customers with an easy registration and enrollment experience. Social networks will come into play as they prove important in capturing customer data and social interaction patterns. Those IAM infrastructures that support marketing initiatives will prove successful in gaining recognition and adoption.
Finally, according to CA, risk-based authentication will move beyond financial services and into the general corporate sector. The need for stronger authentication as well as a simple user experience will drive broader risk-based authentication that collects and analyzes contextual information about users, devices, applications, locations and other risk factors.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
