IBM recently acquired CrossIdeas, adding to the IBM Security Systems division and its existing identity and access management (IAM) portfolio.

Prior to this acquisition, the company had already partnered with IBM in the Ready for IBM Security Intelligence program, and it integrated its identity and access governance solution platform with the IBM Security Identity Manager. CrossIdeas’ identity and access governance capabilities work to help enterprises reduce the risk of insider fraud while addressing regulatory compliance and audit exposures.

Organizations are increasingly relying on ongoing compliance reviews, new audit findings and identity and access governance tools to help determine security risks and govern who should have access to which resources and why.

A comprehensive identity and access governance solution integrated with enterprise IAM helps determine the granularity and integrity of user entitlements so that governance, risk and compliance policy guidelines are met. Granularity is granting access only to those who need it, while integrity ensures no unauthorized access is available from the existing business processes. With key capabilities such as role and entitlement management, identity analytics, context-based access control and ongoing monitoring/reporting in place, organizations are able to protect their business’s critical applications from unauthorized access — and be able to prove it to auditors.

What Analysts Have to Say About the CrossIdeas Acquisition

According to leading industry analysts, CrossIdeas’ solutions offer a business-centric focus on identity governance and analytics. This approach helps minimize the cost and complexity of automating access certification campaigns, auditing granular segregation of duties violations and managing access requests for all enterprise and cloud applications.

In a Forrester Research report, analysts stated that with the acquisition of CrossIdeas, “IBM will add a number of notable IAM capabilities to its product line, including access governance, access request management, role design and management, separation of duties and SAP governance.”

Further, analyst firm Gartner just issued a First Take report on the CrossIdeas acquisition, saying that CrossIdeas brings fine-grained segregation of duties, risk-based role mining, attribute-based access control, IAM-as-a-service readiness and compliance reporting based on the way auditors define policies. These functions, it said, could enable IBM to take a leading role within the identity governance and administration market.