Hitachi ID Identity and Access Management Suite

Digital identity is a primary attack vector in major breaches, with attackers typically starting by compromising user accounts and then pivoting to administrative or service accounts to exploit elevated privileges. Because passwords remain widely used across user, shared, administrative, and service accounts, secure password management is positioned as critical. Regulatory and governance requirements further drive adoption of privileged access and identity governance capabilities, illustrated by Germany’s IT-Sicherheitsgesetz incident reporting expectations for critical infrastructure and US Sarbanes-Oxley separation-of-duties mandates.

Traditional IAM focuses on provisioning, authentication, authorization, and user data storage, commonly including directories, credentials and authenticators, SSO/WAM services, federation, and lifecycle/governance functions. While historically inward-facing, enterprises increasingly extend IAM to partners, suppliers, and customers via identity federation, and traditional IAM can scale to hundreds of thousands of users in well-defined environments.

Hitachi ID Systems (founded as M-Tech in 1992; acquired by Hitachi in 2008) offers an integrated IAM Suite deployable on-premises (Windows infrastructure) or hosted on AWS. The suite includes Identity Manager (identity lifecycle, access governance, workflows, analytics, federation via SAML/SCIM/SPML, and SaaS/AWS gateway functions), Password Manager (password synchronization, policy validation, self-service reset including boot-time PC scenarios, personal vaults, telephone-based resets with PBX/VOIP integration, token and SmartCard PIN management, reporting, and SAML federation), and Privileged Access Manager (AES-encrypted vault with salted encryption, 2FA enforcement, multiple privileged access modes, password rotation, a fingerprinting password-retrieval API for scripts/apps, session recording with enforcement, ticketing integration, auditing reports, and SIEM/syslog export). Strengths emphasize breadth, connectors, and built-in self-service cost reduction; challenges include lower market visibility, lack of out-of-box FIDO/OIDC, and a need for more risk-adaptive authentication granularity.

• Hitachi ID Systems was founded as M-Tech in 1992 in Calgary, Canada.
• The first password management product, P-Synch, was released in 1995.
• The company was purchased by Hitachi in 2008 and became known as Hitachi ID Systems.
• Hitachi ID has over 1,200 customers worldwide serving more than 14 million users.
• The Hitachi ID IAM Suite can be deployed on Windows infrastructure or hosted on Amazon AWS.
• Suite components run on Windows Server, IIS, and Microsoft SQL Server.
• The suite ships with over 100 connectors to directories, systems, and applications.
• Most deployments use 2 to 5 replicated application servers spanning at least two data centers.
• Privileged Access Manager injects a random 128-bit salt prior to encryption to prevent identical hashes for identical passwords.
• Privileged Access Manager can send event information to SIEM via syslog.

• “Digital identity is a primary vector of attack in nearly all the headline-grabbing data breaches of the last few years.”
• “Managing passwords securely has never been more important.”
• “Traditional IAM systems are designed to provision, authenticate, authorize, and store information about users.”
• “The Hitachi ID IAM Suite is designed for open integration.”
• “Access governance and entitlement management functions are based on user requests and approval workflows, which can be automated, where deemed appropriate.”
• “Analytics can be used for evaluating roles and entitlements; for example, finding oversubscribed roles that are too coarse-grained, or finding unused roles that could be eliminated.”
• “The self-service and telephone reset options can significantly help reduce help desk costs.”
• “To eliminate problems with passwords embedded in scripts and applications, PAM provides a password retrieval API.”
• “If users attempt to disable recording, PAM can shut down the session and send alerts.”
• “Hitachi ID IAM Suite is geared toward solving fundamental challenges that all medium to large enterprises have in the identity management space.”