Alwyn Van Niekerk

2nd Annual Identity & Access Management Forum – Day 2

Once again a pretty good day of presentations. Dominic White from Deloitte did a good presentation on multi factor authentication, and we got to play with some amazing hardware from Emeu. There was a lot of talk on the different factors for authentication, being:

• Something you have, e.g. an access card
• Something you know, e.g. a password
• Something you are, e.g. any biometric

Picking up from the talks and the feedback I’d say there’s 2 major requirements from IAM right now:

1. Preventing corporate employees from copying confidential information onto a USB drive.
2. Managing citizen identities.

Citizen identities is absolutely massive in South Africa, with a lot of effort underway currently to try and improve the dire situation we are in w.r.t. our current identity system.

Overall this was a good conference, learnt a few things and got to hear what other people are up to. Overall I’d say there’s still more people talking about IAM than doing it, but it’ll pick up very soon.