Employees, customers, suppliers, and partners are tapping precious corporate information via the Internet, cellphones, and PDAs. As a result, enterprises feel a new urgency to balance their need for security with the demand for access. This mounting pressure should lead to sharp growth in spending on identity and access management products in 2005. According to the Radicati Group, the identity management finished 2004 at $738 mn worldwide, and will rocket up to $10.2 bn by 2008.

Problems with employee identification and access represent about 15% to 35% of all help desk calls, according to Gartner estimates. With each call costing between $10 and $31, simpler identity and access management across the enterprise could produce significant savings. As corporate governance regulations tighten, access management policies will have to be auditable. Systems administrators will prefer software that tracks changes as they are made and records who gets access to what data.

The winners in the corporate identity sweepstakes will be vendors who harness the power of the Internet to simplify access to many applications in large organizations. Gartner estimates that 60% of enterprise customers will buy software that helps them manage access either through a Web portal or across separate corporate networks.

2005 will be the year of RFID
It's a tide, not a wave, but the advance of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags on business supply chains is inexorable. Giants like Wal-Mart and the Department of Defense have held firm on their commitments to make the technology part of their operations, and major chipmakers are ramping up production for the anticipated order deluge. Security and privacy concerns stoke lingering worries over RFID deployments at the consumer level, but in the warehouse, this standard is really coming of age.

Tightening security and access
With all the fear about people using iPods and flash memory devices to walk off with corporate data, IT will be forced to take strict measures against users. Expect to see rigid policies about co-mingling personal and business technologies, and bans on USB flash disks and the like.

Governments around the world will move to replace paper-based IDs with digital products. These new forms of electronic identification will be used in passports, ID cards, bankcards and credit cards, and will include information such as the individual's name, address, nationality, digital photo and even biometric data. Electronic identification will be principally designed to curb fraud and identity theft, but will also speed up the process of identification and authentication. In spite of these measures, identity theft will continue to rise dramatically-particularly, for people and organizations that do business online. It will be imperative for all companies doing business online to spend the money to create more secure methodologies to protect themselves and their customers.