Companies 'won’t have a choice' about using Big Data for ID management

Enterprises will be forced to invest in Big Data technologies to monitor employee behaviour in order to better control remote access to company systems, which is becoming a problem thanks to the ongoing surge in consumerisation.

This is the opinion of Ben Bulpett, director of Enline, a company that has been identified by Oracle as a specialist in identity and access management. Bulpett spoke to Computerworld UK this week at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, where he said employee profiling and behavioural analysis will become an important element of enterprise security controls.

"The whole concept of Big Data is interesting. Organisations will want to start profiling users' log-on activity. It's about an element of risk, profiling and managing that set of users," said Bulpett.

"Companies will start collecting user data to conduct real-time risk based analyses."

Bulpett provided the example of an employee that logs on at 3am from an unknown IP address, which based on the user's past behaviour could be identified as unusual, and so an algorithm run by the company would then lock that user out.

"The younger generation of employees will drive a lot of this, remote working across multiple devices, and organisations have to be prepared. The only way you can do this is if you catch as much information as possible, profile it, and then put it through some sort of algorithm," said Bulpett.

"Security is always a challenge because it is often seen as just an expense, but companies won't have a choice. The market is moving so quickly, people have to find ways to invest."

Bulpett also said that employees, if they want to use multiple devices of their choice, they will have to accept that companies will collect information on them.

"The next generation of employees are going to have to accept that if you are going to interact with an organisation, you are going to have to share information about yourself. People don't want to carry around vast amounts of equipment around, they want to use their own," said Bulpett.

"Companies will also start looking at using social networks instead of creating user accounts, because if you create a user account you impact licencing and a lot of administration goes with that."

He added: "Companies will say: 'I'll let you log on using Facebook, I'll let you use whatever device you want, you are an employee of the company, that's fine'. You will see more and more of that starting to occur."