* Are we familiar with SSO?
Before we get into this edition of the newsletter there’s an important piece of housekeeping to take care of.
[correction] Last week, due to an inadvertent editing transposition we appeared to be saying that Felix Gaehtgens and Sampo Kellomäki were officers of MaXware. Well, not only “appeared” but we actually said it! Actually the two are, respectively, sales and marketing vice president and chief architect for Symlabs. Sorry guys, drinks are on me at the next Catalyst Conference. As Felix put it in his note to me: “Well, I certainly am not going to trade the beautiful Portuguese weather for cold and dark Nordic winters any time soon – even though I have once been fishing in the Norwegian fjords in a Summer about 10 years ago, and it was rather cool, but stunningly beautiful, and the sun never went down!” So I guess we can’t consider this a prediction, either![/correction]
If, like me, you’ve been working on the “identity thing” for many, many years there’s a tendency to think that all the hard work is behind us. People, at least IT people, understand what identity is and why things like federation and single sign-on (SSO) are important. But do they really grasp what it’s all about? My attention was recently drawn to a posting from, I believe, an open source forum (probably one about OpenSSO – but I haven’t been able to track down the source completely. The poster writes:
“We are looking to move to a SSO solution, but were wondering what everyone else is doing? [W]e have 5K + employees that all need access to various platforms (Sun Solaris, VMS, AIX, SCO, HP-UX, Windows, Citrix, AD, Web, etc). Is there some sort of app or some such thing that will do a cross-reference of userid’s? Or do we even need to worry about that (the 8-character limitation on the Unix boxes) if we implement LDAP or AD?”
Read that again, “Is there some sort of app or some such thing that will do a cross-reference of userid’s? Or do we even need to worry about that if we implement LDAP?” We spend our time fine-graining the differences between Enterprise SSO and Web SSO. We worry about the trade-offs between synchronized passwords vs. “secret store” vaults to hold all the passwords. But the person within the organization who should be in tune with the technology the most isn’t sure if simply adopting an LDAP “implementation” will also give him SSO. It’s not only the CxOs who need to be educated. If we overlook continuing to educate the IT community we do so at our own risk.
