Identity and Access Management (IAM) Taking Hold in the Government Arena

Author: Michael Tirres, Senior Project Manager at Makpar

In a blink of an eye … do you wish your tax prep was that fast?  That may be wishful thinking, but that process may be a reality some day for checking your tax refund or passport status.  The world of digital security is changing frequently and so is Identity and Access Management (IAM). 

From the days it was referred to Identity Management (IdM) on-premise only, to now as a cloud offering using integrated biometrics, IAM has evolved.  IAM is a security framework using products, applications, and platforms to manage identities. The goal is to identify, authenticate, and authorize.  This may be oversimplifying IAM, but make no mistake … the process and technology behind identification, authentication, and authorization is a complex and diligent interdependent task. 

IAM is adaptive, it’s federated, it’s integrated, and it’s a process as much as it’s a technology.  Furthermore, there’s room for improvement to prevent threats, avoid loss, and minimize the financial burden for the user. 

There’s always been a growing need to control and safeguard information in this world, which rotates around massive amounts of data.  The challenge is the rate of growth is accelerating and the bad actors are getting smarter. This combined with time, yes, time continues to increase the complexity of providing and securing online services.  How fast can we implement, enable, and react to the ever-growing challenges?  This market brings opportunity to innovate and deploy systems and processes to secure and manage our personal information and our organization’s information. 

With projections nearing $12B by 2026, the Identify and Access Management market is expanding, and government regulations continue to nudge this forward. From SaaS models to hybrid models, companies such as SailPoint, Okta, Oracle, RSA, IBM, Ping, amongst many others, are pushing these boundaries to bring us a more secure, efficient, and self-servicing approach to the information we own and allowed to access. 

Will behavioral biometrics, artificial intelligence, and self-sovereign identity (SSI) be here soon?  You can count on it.  From eye movements to voice inflections, behaviors using unique identifiers will drive multifactor authentication to new levels in security and introduce new trends in identity management.

We’ll continue to support, monitor and guide government agencies to modernize applications and processes to offer the most secure and efficient user experience.

Makpar provides support for one of the largest Identity and Access Management System deployed in the U.S. Government. To learn more about Makpar’s IAM capabilities, please click here.  Please contact us here for more information about how Makpar can help your agency embrace new IAM capabilities.

In addition, to learn more about Michael Tirres’ experience in the government IT arena, please read this recent Q&A interview with him.