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Table of Contents

• What is Identity Management Software?
• The benefits of Identity Management Software
• Typical features of Identity Management Software
• The cost of Identity Management Software
• Considerations when purchasing Identity Management Software
• Relevant Identity Management Software trends

What is Identity Management Software?

Identity Management Software helps manage identities, credentials, policies, and access to critical information within an organization. It offers tools like password management, security-policy enforcement applications, reporting, and monitoring applications that keep unauthorized users away from critical business information.

Identity management software enables policy-based access with an option to selectively revoke access from any given employee.

The benefits of Identity Management Software

• Improved data security: Identity management software helps safeguard the business-critical information from both internal and external security threats. These solutions ensure that only legitimate and authenticated users can access the data and system applications, which significantly lowers the impact of data breaches.
• Granting access based on user roles and policies: The software lets administrators control access to corporate information based upon the job roles. Role-based access control lets employees have access rights only to the specific information required to do their job. It lowers the chances of access by unauthorized users and improves data security.
• Reduced IT costs: Identity management software automates various features of identity authentication, access, and authorization. As a result, an organization can lower significant expenses related to information technology (IT), security, and operations.

Typical features of Identity Management Software

• Access management: Identify, control, and manage authentication and user access to company resources within the IT environment.
• User provisioning: Create, modify, disable, or delete user accounts and their profiles across IT infrastructures and business applications.
• Access certification: Verify user access rights within systems to confirm each user has appropriate and authorized access to resources for compliance and security risk management.
• Password management: Generate and store passwords in an encrypted database and assist in retrieving lost or forgotten passwords.
• Single sign-on: Permits users to access multiple applications connected to a local area network (LAN) after entering their login credentials once, rather than re-entering login credentials individually for every application.
• Multi-factor authentication: A security system that requests two or more credentials to prove user identity before granting access to the system.

The cost of Identity Management Software

Most products in the market are priced on a “per month” basis and can be divided into three pricing tiers based on their starting price.

Price ranges*:

• $1 -$2
• $2 - $28
• $28+

*The pricing included is for the entry-level/lowest-priced offering that was found on vendor websites on July 12, 2019. These ranges correspond to 25th, 75th, and 100th percentile of the pricing information gathered from the vendor websites of sample products.

The above list summarizes pricing for the base plans of most products. An enterprise or premium product, which is priced higher, may include some additional features such as compliance management and self-service access requests.

Considerations when purchasing Identity Management Software

• Does the software offer a portal to request additional access? When purchasing identity management software, consider the number of users that you would like to have access to the software. As the business grows, you’ll want software that can grow along with an increased number of users. The system should also allow having additional access and password resets for users.
• Does the software support multiple devices? Nowadays, users need to access the software utilizing their preferred device and access channel. Thereby, the core authentication and authorization capabilities must be accessible over the web, portable devices, and application programming interfaces (APIs).
• Does the software integrate with existing complex identity systems? The ideal identity management solution should be able to integrate with existing legacy technology, authentication systems, and more.

Relevant Identity Management Software trends

• Artificial intelligence (AI) shapes identity management tools: Nowadays, companies are making use of username and password credentials or multi-factor authentication to access their corporate data. However, both approaches are susceptible to various attacks, such as phishing. It is suggested to make use of new identity management tools enriched with AI capabilities. So, for example, new identity and access management (IAM) tools could use AI functionality such as facial or voice recognition or fingerprints blended with behavioral biometrics (keystroke analysis) to access data. Implementing new IAM tools embedded with AI features can further enhance corporate security.
• Big data and analytics: Together with big data and advanced analytics, access-related risks can be easily identified to make the process of identity management smooth. By using an identity analytics system, identities and access can be managed more proficiently with account provisioning or deprovisioning, privileged access, and authentication.
• Cloud-based identity management tools: In the current market scenario, the majority of firms are migrating their identity management solutions to cloud services. Undoubtedly, identity management as a service is effectively scalable, as the providers handle most administration tasks in the back end. On the other hand, this allows the IT team to concentrate on other priorities. This helps organizations to set up customized levels of security for an entire IT architecture or just one part.