Government Technology

Identity and Access Management (IAM): Coming of Age


In order to do the public's business and trustworthy transactions of all shapes and sizes, governments need to know the answer to a central question: "Who are you?" To do that, and to meet their public missions, governments need ways to manage the identities of individuals, groups and machines at a distance and across agency or jurisdictional lines. They also need to control both how users access information in discrete computer systems, and the mechanism for system-to-system information exchange among agencies or business units.

This issue brief, underwritten by Red Hat, examines how open source software holds the promise of collaboratively developing "a better way" toward ID management for Linux and UNIX that would: support single sign-on, provide tools to more efficiently manage information access and control, be sufficiently robust to meet current compliance requirements and sufficiently nimble to adapt to regulatory changes in the future, reduce administrative overhead and costs, enhance security, and make it easy to manage identity and access control for an single enterprise (individual entity) or through a federated environment (across agency lines).



Government Technology
Public CIO
Emergency Management
Digital Communities