No fear factor: How to make role management work for the enterprise

There are three key objectives to keep in mind for determining the success of any roles-based access and identity management initiative, says Deepak Taneja.

Many corporate IT security professionals still regard roles-based access and identity management as hopelessly complex. This is because the predominantly manual approach many organisations have taken to review and manage roles is typically not scalable, and the dynamic nature of roles themselves — including constant changes in people, functional responsibilities, departments, and information assets — can quickly cause role definitions to get out of sync with the everyday realities of the business.

The challenge of discovering established roles, defining new roles according to business need, connecting roles properly to the IT infrastructure, ensuring that they meet all compliance requirements, and managing roles through their natural lifecycles has, until now, proved to be too complicated and cumbersome to be practical.