Sun Microsystems White Paper Sample

Today’s Web-driven world has redefined for many businesses what it means to succeed. The proliferation of applications that enable life on the Web and the proliferation of Web users have transformed both business strategies and the IT infrastructures that support them, rendering the latter more complex than ever.

This new landscape has given rise to a new set of strategic imperatives for CIOs and CISOs, who must ask themselves how they can:

• Architect an identity infrastructure to meet changing business and security needs
• Build an identity compliance infrastructure that provides the required business transparency
• Develop a scalable, repeatable way to manage users, roles, resources, and policies
• Integrate Web applications and legacy applications into the identity infrastructure
• Extend the enterprise and incorporate partners, subsidiaries, acquisitions, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications into the identity infrastructure

Identity has a critical role to play in this effort. It provides the authentication and other capabilities necessary to give more users access tomore resources as well as the security mechanisms to control the risk associated with access. A crucial issue is whether the identity infrastructure can be deployed in a cost-effective, scalable way that will offer the best possible return on investment.