Making Provisions for Change

With today's tight corporate budgets, few businesses are committing to the millions of dollars that a full-blown identity-management system can require.

With today's tight corporate budgets, few businesses are committing to the millions of dollars that a full-blown identity-management system can require. This resistance frustrates some integrators and consultants, who predict that companies will pay much more in the end when they finally try to connect all the pieces of software and hardware that they are installing now.

"Security is a shared service, like plumbing that has to run through an entire building," says Joe Duffy, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers. "All the bathrooms will need it, not just the one you finish first."

Nevertheless, integrators are not shying from selling partial solutions.

Such solutions should be accompanied by a well-thought-out plan, developed and executed by a person or group whose responsibility is maintaining corporate security, according to Randal Kenworthy, a senior business architect at consulting firm NerveWire. NerveWire breaks identity-management systems into four functional groups that could be implemented individually. Kenworthy designed an interactive calculator that works through the costs of each module. To download, click on the .XLS icon above.

An excerpt from that calculator looks at some of the savings that can be gained by setting up provisioning software and policies to manage user-profiles and access.