IBM Access Management: Celebrating Ten Years of Leadership

A decade of IBM leadership in access management

Tivoli Beat - A weekly IBM service management perspective. IBM's industry leadership in secure access management is more than established and more than entrenched—it's celebrating its 10th birthday.

10 years ago, on September 22, 1999, IBM acquired DASCOM, Inc., a leading provider of centralized user access management solutions aimed at the enterprise market, and rapidly integrated its offerings into the best-in-class Tivoli system management portfolio as part of IBM's holistic security strategy.

Today, it's clear that investment has paid impressive dividends to both IBM and IBM customers.

The user access management solution IBM acquired with DASCOM has since been extensively enhanced, augmented and diversified—becoming what is, by any metric, the most comprehensive, highly scalable and commercially successful suite available today.

Access management solutions spanning many business needs and contexts

IBM Tivoli Access Manager for e-business. This flagship offering of the family provides central user access management functions for Web application security, including flexible authentication, secure role-based access control and auditing features to demonstrate compliance with internal policies and external regulations. Its extensive integration with third-party products—and built-in API, to support new integration possibilities inside and outside the Tivoli portfolio—mean this tool is ideally suited to serve as the centralized access control mechanism of the organization, ensuring only the right people get the right level of access to the right resources.
IBM Tivoli Access Manager for Operating Systems. One security complexity for IT managers to consider carefully is the details of privileged user access control to operating systems used on key systems. More specifically, Linux and UNIX, both available in a variety of flavors, address security in different ways, and with different ramifications to the organization. IBM Tivoli Access Manager for Operating Systems, developed by IBM, leverages the same policy server as the Tivoli Access Manager solution to smooth over these wrinkles; thanks to its comprehensive root user access control, and privileged user auditing, it can help protect sensitive application and platform against unauthorized access by both outsiders and privileged insiders.
IBM Tivoli Access Manager for Enterprise Single Sign-On. Getting best business value from services and applications often means striking a balance between ease of use (to spur productivity) and security (to ensure only the right people obtain access). IBM Tivoli Access Manager for Enterprise Single Sign-On, acquired from Encentuate and integrated with Tivoli security solutions, helps organizations achieve this goal by transparently delivering desktop single sign-on to all services and applications that normally require multiple sign-ons.
IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager. This offering helps organizations open their environment to allow business partners and lines of businesses to gain access to key business applications and services without compromising security. This solution was developed by IBM and integrated with Tivoli Access Manager for e-business in a single package to offer a full featured access control and an identity service for cloud and SaaS service deployments. The identity service helps IT managers simplify application integration in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) by centrally mapping the user and service identities across different security domains including Java, Microsoft and mainframe environments.
IBM Tivoli Security Policy Manager. Just as security enforcement is ideally centralized, so too are the policies used to govern data and application security. IBM Tivoli Security Policy Manager developed by IBM empowers organizations to automate, manage and enforce data access control across different services and domains, at every stage of the policy lifecycle, to reduce the costs of application and data security development, while improving its effectiveness from end to end of the infrastructure.

How the IBM Tivoli access management family continues to deliver business value in the real world

Given such a comprehensive suite of leading offerings, one would expect IBM's Tivoli access management family to have enjoyed considerable customer success in the marketplace.

That, in fact, has proved to be the case, as shown by the number and diversity of customers from around the world. IBM is, and has been for a full decade, the technology leader in the access management market. Every day, hundreds of millions of users leverage the power of IBM's offerings to obtain secure access to thousands of applications and services, at thousands of organizations in different industries and business sectors around the world.

IBM Tivoli access management family interoperates with over 100 different leading technology solutions from both IBM and third parties. These include such immediately recognizable names as Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Citrix, Siebel, Red Hat, Siemens, Novell, Apache, Sun, and many others.

The tale of IBM's success in access management manifest when you consider some of the more prominent customer case studies in which Tivoli Access Manager family solutions have been deployed. Among others:

A leading telecommunications and wireless firm, which uses Tivoli Access Manager for e-business to secure access to an incredible 77 million external users – 35 million of whom also benefit from Tivoli Federated Identity Manager and its support for cross-domain, single-sign on functionality.
A major Spanish bank supports almost two million external users accessing a commercial web portal. Banking is an industry with zero tolerance for security failure, and IBM is a trusted technology provider to support external services of this type.
A large European mobile phone company, with some 8.3 million users and an expansion rate of a hundred thousand users per month, finds that the IBM solution can easily scale to support the load.
Several public sector and national government clients around the world leverage Tivoli Access Manager for e-business and Tivoli Federated Identity Manager to implement single sign-on initiatives using smart cards to enable secure, role-based access to sensitive applications and services.

An interesting fact is that in all of these cases, and many others, IBM's Tivoli access management solution have been paired with IBM Tivoli Directory Server, which functions as a centralized registry of user information. These case studies illustrate how seamlessly and effectively IBM offerings can combine to support client business challenges in different IT environments and contexts.

The inside story from the IBM access management team

In the time since the DASCOM acquisition, many of the access management professionals that came to IBM then are still at IBM and have contributed to expanding the definition of the access management market.

Common to their experience, and underlying their contributions, is a deep sense that IBM has worked to improve its offerings over time in the ways clients need most—and continues to do so.

"Having joined IBM from DASCOM, I am especially thrilled to see the DASCOM/TAM technology on the 10-year anniversary. The fact that ‘access control’ has become the ‘security dial tone’ for modern business applications is a real testimony to the innovation that delivers real value to our clients. I am also excited that the innovations the team has worked on for the past 10 years are being used on a daily basis; each and every day I am a user of TAM to access one of the most critical applications in IBM our w3 intranet portal."
– Venkat Raghavan, Director, Product Management, Security, Risk and Compliance, IBM

“As the development manager from the original DASCOM team, it has been rewarding to see the solution scale to new heights, continue to evolve and deliver customer value. Over the past 10 years, it has been quite a journey for the extended IBM team and customers alike.”
– Brian Turner, Program Director, IBM Tivoli Security Development

“Tivoli Access Manager was in demand 10 years ago for my government customers, and government customers are still purchasing Tivoli Access Manager for e-business today. Tivoli Access Manager for e-business is the dominant solution, with the largest customer base, in the government sector. Its proven scalability, fantastic support, and continual enhancements are the key reasons for this success.”
– Joe Hamblin CISSP, IBM Sales & Distribution, Software Sales Executive IT Specialist

“I started out in IT, supervising Tivoli Access Manager as part of a Web-based authorization system at a small startup, and was so impressed with the solution that I joined IBM. Today I’m part of a global team touting the benefits of IBM’s cross-brand security capabilities – and I never would have gotten where I am without Tivoli Access Manager. Happy tenth anniversary!”
– Glenn Gooding, Executive IT Specialist, Australia Development Lab, IBM

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