The Pervasive Role of Identity in Government Solutions

An effective and efficient government solution requires a strong and highly scalable identity management platform. As noted in a recent Gartner article, governments face many private sector challenges relating to the management of multiple forms of identity and the systems that use these identities. The problem is that most government systems in use today are not supported by sophisticated identity management capabilities. "Over time, however," the report continues, "large-scale government implementations will drive identity and authentication standards and viability, and an identity and access management infrastructure that supports the required heterogeneity in ID, authentication and access management will be increasingly important." 1

Novell has a strong heritage in secure identity management, and Novell Security and Identity has been recognized by nearly every major industry analyst firm as a leader in the secure identity management market. Novell offers a scalable directory infrastructure capable of supporting large-scale deployments, industry-leading identity synchronization, provisioning and access control capabilities, and rich support for a variety of authentication mechanisms.

In addition, the Novell Security and Identity platform underpins the four categories of Novell government solution capabilities—personalized portals, data and application integration, secure infrastructure and core foundation—and for the use of identity to control connections among people and resources in each of these areas.

In the case of government portals, Novell identity management functionality identifies users and authorizes access to specific resources and information. This enables the portal to assemble and personalize the right combination of resources to meet each user's specific needs, and do it privately and securely.

As for comprehensive application and data integration, Novell identity management capabilities secure and automate the connections among data, applications and processes in the same way that identity management traditionally controls connections between people and resources. The result is that "users" (like applications) can have secure, automated access to "resources" (like processes or data sets) from other systems, all based on the profiles established for them through identity management.

A secure infrastructure is also dependent on the creation of identity profiles within a comprehensive identity management system. Every time anyone accesses a file from a government agency, visits sensitive areas of a government Web site or asks for confidential information from a government worker or database, identity must be established and confirmed.

Lastly, comprehensive identity information is essential to enable the core foundation to provide services that simplify user and system management. User identity information is used by the foundation for such functions as delegating system management tasks based on user roles, and automatically distributing software updates to the appropriate workstations.

Identity management is the basis for providing services. It provides the framework for individual and group productivity, network access, compatibility of systems and devices and collaboration between people and agencies. For this reason, it is essential functionality for any government solution.

1 "Government IT Security: The REAL Issues," Gregg Kreizman and Christopher Baum, Gartner, October 2003