* M-Tech aims to ease deployment of identity management projects
Last week’s newsletters evidently resonated well in Canada’s Alberta province. At least M-Tech’s CTO, Idan Shoham, found something to bring to my attention.
In the second of last week’s newsletters I mentioned the “death of passwords.” But, as Shoham rightly pointed out to me: “Most strong authentication technologies, and in particular OTP [one-time passwords], don’t work when a user is disconnected. This is one reason passwords are likely not going away – users want to be able to work in hotel rooms, airports, their back yard, etc., often away from wired or wireless access. In these cases, a central server is unable to authenticate the user, but a locally cached password still works.”
He also reminded me that in multifactor authentication one of the factors is frequently a password, something that won’t disappear for a while. So when in the newsletter, I said that most security experts recommend doing away with passwords entirely, I should amend that to be a recommendation to do away with passwords as the sole method of authentication.
The first newsletter last week was about separate announcements from Courion and Sun to provide standardized, easy-to-use templates and apps for implementing “best practices” identity management as a way of kick-starting a major identity project. Shoham claimed he wanted to remind me that M-Tech had announced the same thing a couple of years ago. Well, I looked back through the newsletters from 2004 and not only could I not find that announcement but couldn’t find any mention of M-Tech that year. As to why I didn’t mention it, Shoham admitted: “I looked for an archived press release about our quick start program but didn’t find one – we probably dropped the ball on making marketing noise about this offering at the time, as we were rather busy moving into a new, larger office.” So we can correct that right now.
According to the documentation, “The ID-Synch Quickstart program allows M-Tech customers to deploy well-defined, preliminary user management functionality quickly and in a cost effective manner. Multiple Quickstart programs are available, each focusing on a subset of the user provisioning feature set.”
There are four Quickstart programs:
* consolidated-admin
* delegated-admin
* automated-admin
* workflow-user-admin
The programs can be used to build upon each other and thus provide more functionality over time although all programs generally begin with consolidated administration and can be expanded on from there. I wish I could point you to someplace online where you could read the Quickstart guide to get a taste for what the programs might offer, but if you look at the ID-Synch Web sites here and here, you can get a sense of what they offer.
