Today we have a number of short, but important, announcements to pass on to you including a new software release, a new white paper and a new call to action.
First up, Likewise Software, the open source company whose major product, Likewise Open, joins desktops and servers (running Linux or Unix) and Macs to an organization’s existing Active Directory announced recently that it is shipping a new version of the software. Likewise Open version 6 offers: significantly improved logon times; enhanced password change support; and a “smart” service manager, which sequences the start-up of daemons, maintaining proper dependencies, with the potential to significantly reduce errors while providing administrators a common model across Unix, Linux and Mac platforms. If yours is a heterogeneous shop, this would be worth checking out.
Radiant Logic has just released a new white paper entitled “Toward an Identity & Context Virtualization Service: A Buyer’s Guide to Virtual Directories.” While it is somewhat slanted towards Radiant Logic’s own Radiant One Virtual Directory Server, it nevertheless provides a lot of information about the importance of, the need for and the many uses of a virtualized directory system. Download it now from here and you might learn a lot.
And finally, Ping Identity’s Andre Durand — who can always be counted on for a memorable quote — delivered a keynote address at the recent Cloud Identity Summit in which he called for “a Password Non-Proliferation Treaty.” According to Andre, “Each new cloud application brings its own directory and associated overhead for managing users and permissions. Users must juggle dozens of separate logins and passwords, administrators are drowning in user provisioning tasks and IT is losing visibility and control. Proprietary solutions can’t scale. We must work together as an industry to stop the password proliferation for stronger Cloud Security.” Now that’s not revolutionary — we (that’s you and I) have been trying to get rid of passwords for years. But Durand feels that it would be a significant step if at the dawn of cloud computing we could draw the line and state that passwords were “off limits” as an authentication mechanism. So what does he see as the answer? “We must have identity management systems that are inherently capable of interfacing with one another. To achieve this, all of our use-cases for identity and security must be based on open standards, freeing us to couple systems, applications and users across both internal and external scenarios, and freeing users to access applications from any location or device,” he said. “Identity federation — a single, strong user password — must be at the center of this new era of Internet Identity Security. Our customers show us again and again that SSO is key to enabling the access, authorization, account management and audit capabilities necessary to ensure Cloud security and bring an end to password proliferation.” Certainly food for thought.
That’s all for today, but there’ll be more announcements in the next issue.
