Last week’s newsletter about the Ponemon Institute’s survey on Identity management and regulatory compliance sponsored by SailPoint, drew an immediate response from Chris Sullivan (Sully), Courion vice president of Customer Solutions. Not that he took issue with the survey or its results, though. It was the headline we used that bothered him. The issue that landed in your inbox was titled “Users see identity and access management as barriers to regulatory compliance.” But on reading the newsletter, that wasn’t what the survey showed. So we’ve re-titled it online as “User survey highlights difficulty of implementing regulatory compliance.” It was the implementation of IAM, not the actual IAM products and services, which appears to be causing difficulty.

Sully suggested that “An effective provisioning and access-compliance infrastructure is the core enabler for regulatory compliance” might make a better title. Overlooking the fact that it’s rather self-serving (since Courion is in the provisioning business!), it’s also not very catchy. Best to keep your day job, Chris!

But his note did remind me that the last time we had chatted was during a Webcast on “Integrating Provisioning and Single Sign-On” at the end of January when I moderated a presentation by Courion and Imprivata client Edward Martinex, vice president and CIO of the Moffitt Cancer Center. Imprivata has now released a white paper/case study of the implementation at Moffitt (“Imprivata and Courion Relieve Password and Key Business Results User Provisioning Woes at Moffitt Cancer Center,” another catchy title!). It’s available here and highlights how Moffitt utilized the two companies’ products, which were not presented as a package deal, but were independently sourced by the cancer center’s IT organization. While the two companies had partnered before, this was a rare instance of a customer bringing together very complementary products.

Evidently, Imprivata thought so well of that Webcast that it has scheduled another for later this week. On Thursday, Match 22 at 1 p.m. EDT (10 a.m. PDT), my friend Phil Becker (impresario of Digital Identity World) will moderate a discussion featuring Imprivata’s Gregg LaRoche and Christopher Paidhrin, CSO of ACS/Southwest Washington Medical Center. Paidhrin was named a Network World AllStar last fall and recently had his SSO implementation profiled in Network World. There’s also a video interview with Paidhrin available in Network World’s ITVideo Library in which he explains how Southwest Washington Medical Center reduced the "hassle factor" of authentication for staff and doctors by implementing the new single sign-on system from Imprivata.

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