Assurance Management
The results of this survey show that interest in the use of SaaS applications among organisations in Germany and the UK is increasing; with flexibility, access by mobile devices and always-on availability being the primary drivers. However, security is still seen as the greatest inhibitor, including the need to protect data from being accessed inappropriately. Identity and access management technologies play a key role in authenticating users according to the rights that they have been granted. Today, there are relatively new breeds of identity management services that extend identity and access management capabilities to externally provisioned applications as well as catering to the needs of both mobile and external users, such as customer and business partners. Such services provide an efficient means of assuaging some of the prime security concerns that organisations have in subscribing to SaaS services.
Cloud-based applications and services, and software-as-a-service applications in particular, are coming into widespread use by organisations of all sizes. Such applications are used to process and store sensitive information making it imperative that user access rights are tightly controlled to ensure that information is secure from loss or theft and remains private. This paper discusses recent developments in identity and access management technologies that aim to extend such controls to services provided from external sources.