Consider the burdens on today's CIO and CSO:

The need for continuous compliance can be labor-intensive. Without automation, the need to meet compliance requirements becomes a recurring nightmare -- "Groundhog Day" for the CSO.

Help desk overload is a huge problem for many organizations -- and a large percentage of the requests involve forgotten passwords.

As the demands on IT grow, administrative costs mount.

Large organizations with hundreds or thousands of employees face the challenge of managing identities. When people exit the company, their accounts need to be immediately terminated. Otherwise, ghost accounts live on in the system, creating vulnerabilities.

A similar problem arises when an employee stays with the company for an extended period and moves through a number of different jobs in different departments. If the employee's identity is not properly managed, he can acquire a variety of privileges -- including access to data -- that could threaten the separation of duties required under governance regulations.

Managing employees in the system has always been an issue. But today's organizations interact with a wide variety of constituents, including customers, vendors and partners. As IT extends beyond the enterprise, the number and variety of identities to be managed increases exponentially.

Internal and external auditors demand that an organization be able to control its IT systems and access to private data -- and auditors are indifferent to the costs associated with these requirements.

Finally, a security breach can spell disaster for an organization. Every day we read about another company facing a storm of negative publicity as a result of its inability to protect confidential data. Just a few weeks ago it was reported that more than 4 million credit card and debit card numbers were stolen by hackers from two US grocery store chains.

No CEO wants to read about his company in stories like that. And, no consumer will want to go to a place where buying a quart of milk will end in an identity theft.

By implementing Identity and Access Management, the CSO can address all these issues and: