'On the Road' with Hitachi ID Systems: Exclusive Interview

TMC's On the Road series recently wrapped up in San Jose, where TMC CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) had the opportunity to sit down and chat with a host of thought leaders from around the technology space.

Tehrani spent a few minutes with Idan Shoham, CTO at Hitachi ID Systems, to learn a little bit more about the identity and access management solutions vendor, and to find out where they are headed next.

Founded in 1992 as M-Tech Information Technology (News - Alert), Inc., Hitachi ID Systems was acquired by Japanese technology giant Hitachi in 2008. The subsidiary specializes in managing identities and authentication factors for Fortune 2,000 companies around globe.

Shoham said that customers are motivated by three main factors: cost, security and compliance. Leveraging Hitachi (News - Alert) technologies, enterprises can automate password resets, minimize help desk calls and automate processes like onboarding and deactivation – tasks that necessitate major administration efforts if handled manually.

Hitachi ID Systems (News - Alert) can also help companies tighten their security measures and ensure compliance by controlling access to privileged accounts as well as by forging stronger passwords and appropriate security rights.

Shoham says that companies in nearly every industry are forced to abide by a dozen or more regulations.

"In an IT security sense, [the regulations] all come down to control over identifying people, authenticating them and limiting what they can and cannot access," he told Tehrani.

With Hitachi's solutions, companies can manage access to dozens of different databases, including Windows, mainframes and UNIX machines. Shoham says that an average user at a large company may have 10 or 15 different passwords, many of which need to be changed every 90 days. Handling this manually comes with major security and cost concerns, he explained.

"In a traditional environment, security is managed inside the silo of each system and application, so you go to one process to create or delete a user for Windows, and a completely different business process to do the exact same thing on SAP (News - Alert)," Shoham said. "So what we try to do is to create a shared infrastructure so that you go to one place for everything."

Looking forward, Hitachi ID Systems hopes to make a bigger leap to the cloud, where it can manage access to hosted applications that are quickly becoming a hit among Shoham's clients.

Click here to check out the product line for Hitachi ID Systems.

Beecher Tuttle is a TMCnet contributor. He has extensive experience writing and editing for print publications and online news websites. He has specialized in a variety of industries, including health care technology, politics and education. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Stefanie Mosca