* Canadian columnist Dan MacLean shares Dave's sentiment that there's more to identity than security
Toronto’s “Globe and Mail” is one of Canada’s leading newspapers. You can tell a lot about what’s on the mind of Canadians by glancing through it. Last Thursday’s paper, for example, featured a front-page headline about Toronto Maple Leaf’s captain Mats Sundin – it seems he’s selling his house. Yes, Torontans do take their hockey seriously, especially in years they don’t make it to the NHL playoffs.
Digging through the paper, though, you’ll find Dan MacLean’s E-INSIDER column (he’s also editor-in-chief of ITWorldCanada.com) titled “ID management offers more than just security”.
Yeah!
I knew those Canadians were smart about identity, after all they gave us Microsoft’s Kim Cameron and Stuart Kwan, Sxip’s Dick Hardt, Quest’s Jackson Shaw and many more.
In MacLean’s column, he notes that “ID management is a concept typically associated solely with information technology security… (b)ut there’s much more to ID management, and even companies that aren’t so security-conscious ought to be thinking about it these days.“ He then quotes IDC Canada’s David Senf, who said: “It’s [identity management] seen as a security tool rather than as a productivity tool.” Isn’t that what I was bemoaning just a few short weeks ago? (see “There’s more to identity than security”).
But, again, last week the issue arose again during an e-mail conversation with Credentica’s Stefan Brands, another Canadian company. Brands’ background is in secure data transactions and encryption, but his current company claims to provide “solutions for enterprises with evolving needs in identity and access management.” The basis of most of Credentica’s offerings is their secure, encrypted signed credentials package (called “Digital Credentials”). It’s telling, I think, that Credentica claims to be working in the Identity and Access Management (IAM) space, rather than the identity management space. Brands rightly claims that people “in government, national security, security companies etc.” have been working on what he called “this stuff” (and which I took to mean access management) for many years. The telling phrase, though, was when he added, “although perhaps not under the nowadays fashionable umbrella term of ‘identity.’”
Certainly Access Management is an area deserving strong advocacy and consideration. It’s a very important area. My only contention, like Dan MacLean’s, is that it’s just a small subset of the entire identity management space.
