Strong ID and access management eludes UK business

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access rights of staff members who leave a company are removed or deactivated when they leave - the other half leave outdated user accesses active and open to malicious misuse as well.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.

"The lack of single "sign-on" awareness together with reliance on passwords was just the first of a series of major concerns highlighted by the research," said Colin Robbins, Insight Consulting principal consultant.

Not all of the research was negative in what it reveals about UK businesses attitudes towards identity and access; one positive aspect was that business is beginning to recognise the threat, with 74 per cent of the respondents admitting that they were actively looking at new 'user-centric' identity management technology.

But Robbins said: "While it is clear that many medium and large enterprise are already investigating new identity and access management technology, what has also become clear from our research is that many businesses are simply not doing enough, or are even in many cases wholly unaware of the existing risks to their business and how to go about managing the resources available to them."

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