With the ongoing focus around security risk and compliance, governance is a hot topic within identity and access management. While identity governance is valuable for securing user access, properly deploying a governance solution can be a tricky endeavor.

In a recent webinar, IBM and KuppingerCole brought together two identity governance gurus to discuss some of the challenges and rewards of identity governance implementations. Mike Small, a fellow analyst at KuppingerCole, opens the webinar up by discussing the governance challenges that the world’s agile connected businesses are facing. Then Andrea Rossi, IBM’s worldwide identity governance sales leader, describes how IBM works to solve those challenges and provide security for all kinds of businesses.

Small begins by defining the new ABC — Agile Businesses Connected. The example he uses is a U.K.-based television company that can now identify viewers of a television show within 60 minutes in order to sell targeted advertising via social media. While this may be just one example, it represents where the marketplace is going. Organizations want to connect with their users in an effort to make faster and more efficient business decisions. But this isn’t easy. Some of the challenges Small sees clients facing revolve around the need to balance benefits, such as the ease of use and accessibility of applications and data, with compliance and risk, need for access, cloud and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) functionality and awareness of cybercrime.

Andrea Rossi follows by taking the audience through some of his customer experiences in the past 10 years, noting how these relate to managing the risk of identity governance. He uses this experience to discuss the four typical starting points for an identity governance project and the lessons he has learned from each one. The three simple pieces of advice he leaves with the audience are: to devote a significant effort to translation, to enlarge your identity governance vision and to talk risk.

Small and Rossi finish off the session by answering questions from the audience that make this David Bowie-themed webinar one that you don’t want to miss.

To get the full experience of the webinar, watch it on demand or listen to the podcast version of the event. There will be more events like this one in the near future. Registration is open for another webinar, titled, “Identity Governance: Not Just for Compliance,” which is taking place June 24.