Long term partners, Sun Microsystems and Accenture have announced a new identity and access management solution; the Accenture Smart Identity Solution – a system that provides end-to-end identity management, as well as multi-factor authentication techniques, said the vendors.

Pat Sullivan, Sun Microsystems global account director for Accenture, said the solution stems from requirements in the government space and the need to control online government services.

Alastair MacWillson, Accenture’s security practice managing director, added, “Businesses and government organisations can improve security and compliance, while increasing operation efficiency, improving customer and citizen satisfaction, whilst at the same time, decreasing IT administrative cost and complexity.”

The system can integrate with organisation’s existing enterprise resource planning systems, added Sullivan.

Working together with the new offering are four other jointly-developed solutions, also announced today, including the Accenture Secure SOA Solution. This allows organisations to open up their IT systems to third parties but still remain in control of access and authentication.

Sullivan noted the problem with SOA systems is they are generally high risk. “Most SOA systems allow users no ability to segment access according to the sensibility if data,” he said, describing the problem as “an immaturity of access control.”

“The new system links the identity and access management system with SOA, so an organisation knows who has access,” Sullivan said.

The other three solutions released were: the Accenture Solution for Control and Compliance, the Accenture Enterprise Identity Management Solution, and the Accenture SOA Jumpstart Solution for Sun Java.

All of the new products were built using Sun Java System Management Suite, Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite, Solaris Operating System and Sun Java System Portal Server.

“Based on Sun’s standards-based technology and Accenture’s business process expertise, today’s announcements bring to the market a field-tested portfolio of solutions that provides our joint customers with a great foundation for achieving high performance in identity management, SOA and secure SOA,” said Karen Tegan Padir, Sun Microsystems vice president of engineering and software infrastructure.