Identity Management-as-a-Service

It seems that most people these days understand what Identity Management it. For those that don’t, it describes the management of individual identifiers, their authentication, authorization and permissions within or across system and enterprise boundaries. In other words, who are you and what can you access, either physically or virtually. The goal of identity management is to increase security and productivity while decreasing costs. Some might refer to this as Access and Identity Management as well.

This is all well and good if you have total control over your environment, but what happens when you move to the cloud? The effort and the infrastructure to manage identities gets more complex and harder to deal with, but you can’t ignore it. It’s not just a nice to have, it’s the foundation of everything done in modern government.

Federal, State, Local, and Educational institutions are looking to cut cost and be more agile in changing IT environments. Just when you think you can’t take any more, welcome to Identity Management-as-a-Service. There was a paper published recently on the Government Technology site called Understanding Identity Management-as-a-Service. It does a nice job of helping to understand what IDMaas is and the benefits it can bring to government.

You can find the paper here: http://bit.ly/R5qR7o This Center for Digital Government issue brief can help you understand how to get started.