* Identity management findings from Australia
News from the hinterlands still travels slowly. I’ve just gotten word, from Agreon’s Brian Brannigan, of a conference held last December in Brisbane, Australia. Sponsored by the Queensland government as well as Australia’s National Consultative Committee on Security and Risk, the Virtual Opportunity Congress IV on Identity & Access 2006 focused on issues of identity management, access, security and privacy in the online environment. The event brought together over 100 delegates from government, banking, finance, health, transport, education, defense, social services and “other sectors of the economy where identity management has vital implications.” The final report of the meeting is now available online and it does make interesting reading.
Among the key points covered are:
* Emerging information technologies have created exciting opportunities in commerce, education and healthcare, but have also afforded new avenues for crime.
* Identity protocols established in the past are no longer applicable as centralized controls are overwhelmed by the viral, unpredictable and anonymous challenges of the Internet.
* Federated identity management and standards based approaches involving partners working together to produce common standards and protocols, may be the way forward.
* The public’s unwillingness to give organizations information is based on their fatigue with unnecessary intrusion as much as the fear of criminal exploitation.
* Consumers demand security usability, certainty of Web site identity, the provision of sufficient information to allow swift decision making and a reasonable number of steps to navigate any particular transaction.
There are a number of other points as well. The most fascinating aspect, to me, is that these are the same problems we see in the United States as well as in Europe, Asia and indeed, all over the world. It’s an affirmation that the “digital culture” is universal with some slight differences which might be dubbed “regional dialects.” The report includes very good summaries of the presentations and while not ground-breaking or earth-shattering, it does provide a slightly differing perspective on the same problems we all face.
Downloads: Too often we take older technologies (like, say, LDAP) for granted without realizing that a new generation of identity professionals has little or no background in them. I’d like to point out two LDAP tutorials that can give the person new to directories the background they need. Brad Marshall’s Introduction to LDAP is a nicely illustrated, non-PDF (it’s all on one HTML page!) overview. The YoLinux LDAP Tutorial: Deploying OpenLDAP is more application and platform specific. While OpenLDAP is available for Linux, Unix and Windows, only the first of these is really covered. Both documents, though, include links to other LDAP tutorials and sites so that you can continue your education.
