Identity Management Ready to Skyrocket

If you thought identity management technology was catching on, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

That's the thrust of a new report published Wednesday by Forrester Research. The research firm predicts that identity and access management, a $2.6 billion market in 2006, will grow to $12.3 billion by 2014.

"Even after years of healthy adoption rates, the IAM market is actually just beginning its trajectory toward broad adoption and deep penetration," says the report, which was written by Forrester analysts Andras Cser and Jonathan Penn.

Regulatory compliance is one of the key drivers behind the acceleration of the IAM market, Cser said in an interview. Organizations need to prove that they are controlling access to sensitive information, and that users are gaining access only to the data they need to do their jobs. IAM products can help them do that, he said.

"Enterprises have been interested in IAM for years, but they weren't always clear on how to get business value out of it," Cser said. "Compliance is bringing that value to them."

The provisioning elements of IAM suites and products are drawing the most dollars, according to the report. Provisioning accounted for 50 percent of all IAM revenues in 2006 and is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 25.4 percent. In a nutshell, the provisioning element allows enterprises to impose access restrictions on users as they are added to the network, simplifying the process of identifying who they are and what data they should have.

Over time, more and more vendors will offer provisioning and other IAM capabilities as services, which could make the process of identity management even simpler for the enterprise, Cser says. More than 40 percent of the IAM market will be for services, not software, according to the report.

The rapid move toward identity and access management will improve the chances of single sign-on technology, which has been around for more than a decade but has yet to catch on. But SSO technology will likely be integrated into IAM solutions, and stand-alone products will begin to fade out entirely, Cser predicted.

Indeed, all of the different components of IAM have already begun to meld, as vendors give up point products in favor of IAM suites, Cser observed. Large companies such as IBM, Novell, and Oracle already offer suites that include directory, metadirectory, provisioning, SSO, and federated identity management, he noted.

"There's a real interest in creating a single 'source of truth' that contains all of the information about the individual and his access rights, all in one location," Cser said.

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