Note: this blog is a mirror of my HP Labs Blog, on the same topic, accessible at: http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Research-on-Security-and/bg-p/163

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Research Report: Lack of Strong Identity and Access Management in UK Businesses …

A recent article by Miya Knights, called “Strong ID and Access Management eludes UK Business” provides an overview of the findings of a recent research report by Insight Consulting, on UK business attitudes towards identity and access management. Here are a few key points highlighted in this article:

“New research into attitudes towards identity and access management has found very few are taking effective steps to address potential security lapses.

Although most UK businesses realise the increased threat from inadequate security systems and policies the research, produced for Siemens-owned Insight Consulting, found 71 per cent of companies still rely solely username and password authentication, which has been criticised for its effectiveness in protecting against malicious attacks.A further 62 per cent of the 259 IT services and management professionals surveyed admitted that their organisation had no information security management system in place, or at least they didn't know if it did.

And more than 90 per cent do not have a fully automated solution capable of producing audit reports detailing network, application and data access, despite the fact that 51 per cent of businesses surveyed now have to deal with increasing partner, supplier and customer system access.

In addition, only 50 per cent of respondents were confident that network access rights of staff members who leave a company are removed or deactivated when they leave - the other half leave outdated user accesses active and open to malicious misuse as well.

Only 22 per cent of businesses have an enterprise single sign-on identity and access management systems in place, which Insight said delivers the fastest return on investment.”

--- NOTE: my original HP blog can be found here ---

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