Access granted: The imperative of innovation and standardization in information security

The management of digital identities, despite its potential to generate business value, creates significant engineering challenges for modern firms. In this paper, we first provide an architectural overview of identity and access management (IDAM) technologies along with an analysis of patenting activities to establish that the IDAM market segment dominates the information security sector. An empirical study, based on data pertaining to public firms with a significant share of the IDAM market, shows that regulations and the frequency of malicious attacks are strongly correlated with increasing demand. While demand for identity and access management products has been exponentially increasing, innovation has only been moving at a moderate rate after declining near the end of the market bubble of 2000. The stock market's valuation of IDAM firms, while controlling for overall market conditions, has consequently been fairly static since 2001 and has followed similar trends in other segments of the IT industry. We therefore propose a two-pronged strategy involving: (i) standardization efforts on the engineering front; and (ii) additional regulations to stimulate innovation by IDAM firms.