Book excerpt: Today, security is a concern for everyone, from members of the board to the data center. Each day another data breach occurs. These incidents can affect an organization's brand, investment return, and customer base. Time spent managing security incidents and managing risks can take time away from focusing on strategic business objectives. Organizations need to address security challenges by administering, securing, and monitoring identities, roles, and entitlements with efficient life-cycle management, access controls, and compliance auditing. Those tasks include automated and policy-based user management to effectively manage user accounts and centralized authorization for web and other applications, and also enterprise, web, and federated single sign-on, inside, outside, and between organizations. Increasingly important requirements are the integration with stronger forms of authentication (smart cards, tokens, one-time passwords, and so forth) and centralizing policy-based access control of business-critical applications, files, and operating platforms. This IBM® RedpaperTM publication describes how the IBM Tivoli® Identity and Access Assurance offering can help you address compliance initiatives, operational costs (automating manual administrative tasks that can reduce help desk cost), operational security posture (administering and enforcing user access to resources), and operational efficiencies (enhancing user productivity).