Identity Management Systems: A Comparative Analysis

This article describes how in today's digital world, customers have made it a common practice to maintain user accounts with different service providers to access a range of services. In such environment, all attributes of the identity must be verified to operate, otherwise the resources would be vulnerable to financial and data loss. This article contends that makes it important to form an Identity Management System, which could provide central administration, user self- service, role based access control and integrated user management. Identity Management becomes very much vital for the environment working with multiple technologies, as it governs an entity (i.e. a human or a software agent) to authenticate and authorize for accessing the network via multiple technologies. Successful Identity Management increases the efficiency, security, access control and decreases the complexity, cost and many repetitive works. Essential features of present day identity management systems have been identified in the present work. A comparative analysis of these identity management systems has been carried out to establish the present-day industry practices. Along with that, specific challenges to the present-day identity management systems have been identified. The article helps in the identification of suitable Identity Management System for specific applications.