January 27, 2017 By Nick Oropall 2 min read

The Gartner IAM Summit in London is one of the most interesting security conferences of the year. The annual event draws IT, cybersecurity and business professionals, and it offers resources any organization can use to keep its end users secure and compliant while enabling them to access critical information and perform their jobs efficiently.

Security Starts With People

Identity and access management (IAM) began as way for organizations to automate user processes, comply with regulations and manage access. These solutions have expanded, however, to optimize processes, empower users and secure the organization. The revolution of cloud, mobile and social has generated more capabilities and functionality for end users, but it also created new IT headaches.

The Gartner IAM Summit offers vendors from around the world an opportunity to showcase their solutions to these new problems and to learn from each other. This year, IBM plans to lead the conversation by promoting the idea that security starts with people. This means that every organization must know who its users are and what they do.

An Integrated Approach to IAM

It’s critical for organizations to distinguish between legitimate users and impostors leveraging stolen credentials. Passwords are generally insecure, hard to remember and inconvenient. IBM tackled the problem head on with multifactor authentication (MFA), an increasingly popular practice that requires users to provide something only they have, such as a biometric indicator or one-time password, to access data.

To know what users do, organizations must be confident that their trusted insiders are keeping corporate data safe. IBM proposed an integrated approach to help customers reduce their exposure to insider threats by securing sensitive data, governing user identities and analyzing user behavior to spot suspicious activity. These new protection services provide clear, actionable intelligence to close the security gaps insiders might exploit.

Business transformation in the digital era is also enabled through cloud IAM. User identities are at the center of this digital transformation, which encompasses cloud, mobile and social integration. Cloud IAM facilitates seamless integration and access across legacy and modern systems alike. IBM’s cloud-delivered IAM offering enables IT professionals to deliver access, federation, governance and intelligence from an entirely cloud-based identity service.

Visit IBM at the Gartner IAM Summit

To learn more about IBM’s MFA, cloud and governance offerings, please join us at the Gartner IAM Summit in London from March 6 to 7. Be sure to stop by IBM’s session and booth. We look forward to seeing you there!

If you are interested in IBM’s IAM strategy or Gartner’s take on the trends and future of IAM, check out our on-demand webinar, “The Trends and Future of Identity and Access Management — Security, Analytics, Cloud, Mobile and More.”

Register Now to view the on-demand webinar

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