In Part 1 and Part 2 of my series on the value of identity, we looked at the consequences of revealing excessive personal information in public, more specifically the digital realm, can have on the individual and an organization. We saw that hackers can use the information you reveal on social media and the internet not only to impersonate and steal your identity, but to even infiltrate and take control of your company’s network. 

According to the new 2016 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), legitimate user credentials were used in most data breaches, with some 63 percent of them using weak, default, or stolen passwords. This may come as some surprise to businesses that are not yet victims of such breaches as they continue to utilize homegrown, piecemeal, or legacy identity access management (IAM) solutions. While your CIO is focused on perimeter defense, your challenge is to shift this focus to the need for a more robust, modern, and integrated IAM solution, which is easier said than done.

As you may have heard, we recently announced that we have become an Affiliate Member of the IMS Global Learning Consortium. 

The OneRoster standard is a subset of the Learning Information Services standard that focuses on the school’s needs to exchange roster information and grades. 

In my recent post, I discussed how in today’s world, identity is ubiquitous – it reaches into almost everything we touch, while identity theft and fraud have become near constant topics in the news.

Recently, our CEO, James Litton sat down with the South Texas chapter of ISSA as part of the organization's podcast series on cybersecurity. Their conversation covered a wide range of security and identity and access management (IAM) topics, including identity and the Internet of Things, the future of passwords, contingent workers, IAM and the cloud, and much more.

Over the past two decades, my work in information technology has exposed me to home end users, as well as corporate environments of every shape and size, throughout most sectors of the industry. These experiences have provided a unique perspective into the struggles that individuals and organizations face regarding personal information and proper user identity and data management.

There is no doubt that single sign-on (SSO) capabilities are an important part of any identity and access management (IAM) solution. SSO reduces user frustrations by eliminating the need to keep a list of separate login credentials for individual applications and lowers support costs by helping to reduce the amount of time IT spends addressing login issues and resetting forgotten passwords. Single sign-on can also be utilized for documenting user account activity.

It is a challenging reality of the retail sector that employees are traditionally the weakest link to deterring digital security threats, such as system breaches and data theft. In a complex environment where employee turnover, seasonal workers, a mobile workforce, and shifting roles are a constant challenge, protecting the organization from security threats requires a vigilant approach to access and identity governance.

The goal of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI) is to protect cardholder information from abuse. While the standard does not make any technology recommendations, its requirements line up with best practices for how payment card information should be handled, communicated, and stored in order to sufficiently secure it.

According to Statista, the market for identity and access management is expected to grow to 7.1 billion dollars by the year 2018. This is up from 4.5 billion dollars in 2012; and much of this growth can be attributed to the fact that so many organizations are looking to upgrade their identity management software to better meet the security and workflow needs their company faces.

Unfortunately, there is no odometer on your current identity management solution that tells you it is time for an upgrade. Instead, knowing when you need to look at making a change can be determined by these four key factors.