Courion Corporation

Financial Institutions See IAM as #1 Priority

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Deloitte has just released their 2010 Financial Services Global Security Study and once again identity and access management has topped the list as the "Top Security Initiative" for enterprises in 2010.  It is encouraging to see so many respondents highlighting the importance of improving security and meeting regulatory compliance requirements as key drivers to adopting Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions.

Other Findings:

• Data loss prevention has taken on greater urgency: Data loss is caused by an intended or unintended action on the part of an organization's people. When asked to characterize their ability to thwart internal breaches, only 34 percent of respondents are "very confident".
• Regulatory compliance is a key priority for financial institutions: Financial institutions are clearly expecting more regulatory pressure. Respondents to the survey include regulatory and legislative compliance as one of their top five initiatives and are hiring more internal auditors to resolve internal and external audit findings in preparation.
• Business alignment is still lacking: While 87 percent of respondents either have, or plan to have, a security strategy within the next 12 months, respondents reveal that security functions do not get input or involvement from the lines of business when the strategy is being developed; this indicates that strategy development tends to be driven by the security function rather than driven by business goals.

IAM solutions need to be able to integrate with data protection solutions like DLP; they need to help relieve increasing regulatory pressures; and they need to help IT engage the business into the process of securing access to data.  This is what we call Access Assurance. 

Failure to clamp down on data access has real and painful consequences for any organization, not just those in the financial sector. Data breaches are getting more expensive, regulations more onerous, and catastrophic bad press can have negative impact for years.