I’ll be the first to admit that there are things you should read besides my own deathless prose. Not instead of, mind you, but in addition to! Today I’d like to recommend a couple of items.

Tim Bouma, who is acting director, identity management for Canada’s Treasury Board Secretariat, recently pointed me to a slide deck he used for a presentation on “Identity Management and its Relationship to Information Management” in the context of the government of Canada (GC).

His premise: “Most people have a high-level understanding of identity management, and its benefits to individual users and their organizations. However, the extent of knowledge of identity management varies widely throughout the many business contexts in government in which identity is used and managed. Given the horizontal nature of identity management, and the broad recognition that identity is a key enabler to program and service integrity, TBS is developing a GC-wide framework for identity management. A key aspect of this framework acknowledges that managing identity is an information-intensive process and therefore, requires the application of sound information management practices. This presentation presents the key concepts of identity management, and explores the relationship between identity management and information management.”

While it would be better to have his commentary along with the slides, the text and graphics alone are worth spending some time on as they do show a path towards convergence of identity management and information management technologies. It’s available in PowerPoint or Acrobat.

Another interesting Acrobat file discusses the results of the recent “Privileged Password” survey conducted by Cyber-Ark. A privileged password is defined by the company as the passwords for non-personal accounts “…that exist in virtually every device or software application in an enterprise, such as root on a UNIX server, Administrator on a Windows workstation, and Cisco Enable on a Cisco device.”

Among the more surprising statistics of this survey of 140-plus IT professionals, the results revealed that privileged passwords are far more common in enterprises than previously thought: approximately one-half of all enterprises contain more privileged passwords than individual ones! Also, although these privileged passwords provide super-user system access, the survey shows that up to 42% are never updated; a daunting prospect in today's environment of increased audits and hacker attacks.

Dave Kearns is a consultant and editor of IdM, the Journal of Identity Management.