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If you want to understand identity Management, you have to first be able to analyze the problems surrounding coorporate identities today. Courion, an identity software vendor (I recently completed training on their product), held an event where they presented their product. An attendee wrote:

Observations from Converge:

- The main industry vertical customers attending were financial and health care.   User provisioning is a key issue and it is very expensive to do manually

- RoleCourier is gaining traction as customers are using it to avoid complexity, excessive roles, and political situations that arise when doing role-based provisioning

- ComplianceCourier is getting a lot of interest for its capability to enable business managers to periodically review and verify employee access rights

- There was a great customer presentation from Goodyear Tire and Rubber Corporation, where they discussed a previous failed attempt at implementing IAM, followed by their project with Courion, which is rolling out very smoothly.  One interesting note: a focus on educating and motivating users to appreciate the new system really pays off.

So from this persons take, and from the Courion products spectrum we see that some of the major IT security needs are: Provisioning/De-provisioning, Role Management, Compliance (government regulation etc), and there is also Password management (which the writer left out).

In subsequent posts, I will explore each one of these  areas of Identity. I will also be sharing more details about Courion’s product,  how it works, as well as what some of the technical challenges await Identity integrators.