Addressing Government Agency Access and Authentication Challenges

From: The Essentials Series: IT Compliance - Volume II

By: Rebecca Herold

The Importance of Authentication and Access Control

Authenticating users to access enterprise information resources is a critical component of enterprise information security. Creating technologies that authenticate users with a high degree of confidence has always been a challenge not only because of the typical complexity of the systems but also because of the amount of confidence that must be placed within the end user to appropriately secure his or her own user authentication information, most commonly the user ID and password. This challenge increased exponentially as computing moved from the solely centralized mainframe to decentralized enterprise business processing on multiple, business unit managed servers, and then expanded beyond the perimeter into the Internet and systems owned and managed by business partners.