Accelerating the deployment of security service infrastructure with collective intelligence and analytics

Abstract

With the increasing complexity of IT outsourcing environments thousands of servers and their configurations are increasingly managed by globally distributed teams. This requires a flexible identity access management process in place to efficiently provision necessary access rights for a given system, only if users need it, when they need it and for only as long as they need it. In this paper we present a novel approach to discovering required role permissions by integrating system data and enterprise crowd sourcing (a process where a group of experts solve problems through collaboration). By mining server registries, compliance repositories (such as user revalidation records), we derive a set of servers and the respective access rights for each team member. This data is then validated and updated by one or more team members using the principles of crowd sourcing. We show that this approach improves the role discovery process and accelerates the deployment of the security service infrastructure. © 2012 IEEE.