Twenty years ago, the IT

department defined the

ident i ty of an end user
through the one device that
he or she used: a desktop
computer. Even then, identity and
access management (IAM) was
no simple task: End users were
constantly changing jobs, applications,
and locations on the internal
network, and their identities and
access privileges had to follow.
Today, IAM is light-years more
complex. End users are accessing
corporate data from any number
of locations, using any number of
devices and applications. The onpremises
corporate network is now
supplemented by any number of
cloud networks, and the endpoints
and servers are often part of virtual
environments, in which the computing
may be done on a variety of
systems. Enterprise IT departments
are only just beginning to wrestle
with the Internet of Things (IoT),
which could add a whole new array
of devices to the end user s portfolio.