Security Identity Management Alert

Dave Kearns provides the information you need to evaluate, install and maintain your corporate identity management system.

Search Security Identity Management Alert Free-email newsletter: Identity management news and resources from NetworkWorld.

New ways to approach IdM: 02/09/10; Recently I had the opportunity to chat with two of the more knowledgeable people in the Privileged User Management (PUM -- sometimes called Privileged Identity Management, PIM) space -- Phil Lieberman, CEO of Lieberman Software and Shlomi Dinoor, vice president of emerging technologies, Cyber-Ark Labs.
Oracle-Sun merger trumps iPad announcement: 02/05/10; The European Union finally dropped its objections to Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, so the deal went forward and Sun essentially ceased to exist late last month. To mark the occasion, Oracle held a big day-long announcement session in San Francisco, on the same day -- and just a couple of miles away -- from Apple's introduction of the iPad. Considering all that's been said after the events, the Oracle-Sun merger will have a bigger impact on the future of technology.
User provisioning: right access to the right people: 02/02/10; Last issue we touched on a new definition for identity. Today I'd like to present the definitive view of the first, both historically as well as in the context of adding identity and access management (IAM) to your organization. User provisioning has been called the "killer app" for identity management. It started us down the road to IdM over a dozen years ago. In fact, we almost take it for granted today. But what does it involve, what does it imply, and why does it matter?
The 'game' of identity: 01/29/10; Back in the day when personal computers where starting to become commonplace, the various machines (Commodore VIC-20, Atari, TRS-80, Apple I and others) each had its own operating system. Software could only run on one machine, which meant there were few choices and high prices. But what they all had was built-in BASIC, the programming language. Most had a BASIC interpreter, but the IBM PC came with a BASIC compiler (showing, I guess, that it was intended for bigger and better things).
A security event without leaving your home: 01/26/10; Last fall I was twice put in the quandary of choosing between two conferences going on simultaneously. In September there was Digital ID World in Las Vegas and The Experts Conference in Berlin. While November saw both the Cloud Computing Expo and the Internet Identity Workshop sharing the same week. I thought I could shuttle between Cloud Computing and IIW, since they were being held only 5 miles apart, but in reality that was a no go.
10 years ago: Standards in the spotlight: 01/22/10; We were listening to Christina Aguilera's "What a Girl Wants" (or maybe, Marc Anthony's "I Need To Know"). It was January 2000. A month mistakenly thought of as the beginning of the 21st century. And we were all very happy that the gloom and doom predictions for the Y2K bug had proven, mostly, to be false. But what was the hot news in identity management?
Identity issues for 2010, Part 3: 01/19/10; Today we'll wind up the predictions for the coming year that have come to me from pundits and thought leaders in the IdM industry.
Ping Identity joins OpenID Foundation: 01/15/10; There were some interesting moves in the user-centric identity space last week, which may (or may not) foretell some changes coming in the next year.
More Identity issues for 2010: 01/12/10; Today we'll get back to predictions for 2010 as offered to me by some of the leading lights of the IdM universe. You'll remember (I hope) that two issues ago we looked at predictions for identity and cloud computing, the most popular topic from my correspondents. The next most popular topic was mergers and acquisitions, with some surprising answers.
Will Burton Group be lost in the M&A shuffle?: 01/07/10; I ended the last issue by promising more predictions for this one. And I intended to look at merger and acquisition predictions today. But events have caught up with us -- the first major acquisition of 2010 is already upon us. In fact, agreement was reached on Dec. 30, but only announced last week. So we'll consider Gartner's purchase of the Burton Group to be the lead-off merger and acquistion activity for the year.
Identity issues for 2010: 01/05/10; A belated Happy New Year to you all, and let's hope it's a better one that 2009. But what can we look forward to in the coming year? I posed that question to a number of people in the IdM industry and over the next few issues we'll look at what they had to say.
Lessons learned from the 'Underwear Bomber': 01/04/10; You might know him as the "Underwear Bomber" (the "Pants Bomber" in the United Kingdom) or, in less exalted circles, the "Crotch Bomber." But however you refer to him, it's clear that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has been the major topic of conversation over the past 10 days. What hasn't been touched on yet (at least I haven't seen it) is the lesson this can teach us about identity systems.
Santa sparks identity crisis: 12/22/09; Last issue I talked about identity as we saw it 10 years ago, in 1999. Today, I'd like to reprise a newsletter from five years ago, Christmas week in 2004. Nothing much has changed in those five years, or everything has. As the French say: "plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose." Happy Holidays, everybody!
10 years ago in IdM: 12/17/09; Once a month we get nostalgic in the newsletter, and look back 10 years to see how far we've come. Today we'll see what the hot topics were in December 1999.
Microsoft's acquisition of Sentillion stands out: 12/15/09; It took until December, but what could be the biggest acquisition story of the year broke last week. At least until Oracle's buyout of Sun gets EU approval, Microsoft's acquisition of Sentillion will be the big one.
IdM concerns from across the ocean: 12/11/09; It's the nature of global communications that a) I hear about IdM projects worldwide almost daily, but b) talking to the people behind the projects usually requires either I travel to them or they travel to the United States. The nine-hour time difference between here and Europe, for example, means that I would be on the phone at 7 a.m. (not a pretty sight at all) or my European contact would be on the phone at 10 p.m. (usually from a noisy "watering hole"). Neither is conducive to good conversation.
Personalizing the Web browsing experience: 12/08/09; Kynetx co-founders Phil Windley (CTO) and Stephen Fulling (CEO) passed through last week but I did manage to grab a few words with them to see how the company, and the product (which I called "a greasemonkey-like scripting tool" last spring) were doing.
The best of both directories: 12/04/09; A recent IT World opinion piece ("The decline and fall of the relational database") was very interesting to me because it postulated that one possible replacement for the RDBMS (indeed, the first one listed) was the "hierarchical information model." The author took this to mean an XML system, but old directory (e.g., LDAP) hands know full well that the directory tree is a hierarchical data storage system.
Real Privacy Management is built for speed: 12/01/09; I like to think of PKI -- Public Key Infrastructure -- as better than no encryption at all, but only slightly. It's cumbersome to set up and maintain. It's expensive in terms of both money and CPU cycles. And it's off the end of the scale when it comes to user unfriendliness. I sure wish there was something better.
Microsoft adds identity to cloud: 11/25/09; Everyone eyeing Microsoft's Azure, their candidate for cloud-based computing, can at least agree on one thing: Redmond is late to the party that's dominated by Salesforce.com, Google, Amazon and a host of others. How can they hope to differentiate themselves?
Courion cuts cost of provisioning systems: 11/20/09; Whenever I go through the archives from the early days of this newsletter (as I did for the last issue) I'm reminded of the day back in the fall of 1999 when I came across a small booth in the "start-ups alley" area of a trade show, which featured the new eProvisionware from Business Layers. In my mind that was the beginning of the identity management era.
Not much has changed on the directory front: 11/17/09; Ten years ago this month directories were all the rage in this newsletter. Well, it was called the Directory Services newsletter.
More announcements from Gartner summit: 11/13/09; I never did make it to Gartner's Identity and Access Management Summit in San Diego last week. I had the misfortune to throw my back out over the weekend, and couldn't face the plane and airport. So I'd like to publicly thank Quest's Jackson Shaw for ably filling in for me on Ray Wagner's Pundits' Panel. But even though I wasn't there, I did find out about all of the announcements that were made and I'd like to share a few more with you.
Sailpoint, Aveksa announce offerings at Gartner Summit: 11/10/09; Last week I put in a brief appearance at the Gartner Group's Identity and Access Management Summit in San Diego. This is a conference I've had few good things to say about in the past (and which Gartner Vice President Ray Wagner reminded me about this time) but it does serve a useful purpose. The conference content is geared towards its attendees who aren't necessarily IdM geeks or even security wonks. It attracts a more business-side oriented clientele and these are people who need to learn about IdM/IAM even if they have to be spoon-fed.
The importance of context: 11/06/09; Context is important. I know I say that a lot, but I'll keep saying it until you all agree. That is to say, you're entitled to your own opinion but if your opinion is that context isn't important then your opinion is just wrong. To clarify for those of you new to this argument, context refers to the who, what, when, where, why and how of a transaction, in particular an identity-based transaction. Knowing those things greatly reduces the chances of fraud, mitigating the risk involved in the transaction.