* Abridean CTO Greg O'Malley sends in his predictions for 2005
We’ve been looking at predictions for what’s going to happen in the identity management area in 2005, and the returns from Nova Scotia are now in (hey, it’s winter up in the Maritime provinces and it takes longer to get to the mail box!). Abridean CTO Greg O’Malley has chipped in with what his crystal ball is showing for the near future. Among the things O’Malley sees happening this year:
* “Failures and successes with user management and provisioning deployments will result in best practices that will largely focus on a narrow set of services rather than the broad mandates that have shown up in RFIs and RFPs.”
[Kearns comment: It’s about time! We’ve been preaching small steps leading to the big picture for years; maybe it’s finally starting to sink in.]
* “Obviously, government and industry regulations will begin to significantly impact our market in 2005. One particular area of interest is the impact on IT departments themselves. Regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, will result in a transformation of how traditional privileged operating system accounts are managed. Specifically, the privileges model will be transformed from perpetual rights assignment to dynamic and time sensitive assignments that are tightly controlled and audited.”
[Kearns comment: It will be interesting to see how IT managers, usually the drivers of change, react to being on the receiving end.]
* “Many characteristics of meta-directory products will become part of the basic LDAP directory. Vendors in this space will be challenged to find value propositions that are compelling enough for customer to choose expensive third party meta-directory products over using inherent features of the LDAP directory or even open source solutions.”
[Kearns comment: It’s nice to think that there’s room to improve the directory, and this would be an improvement.]
* “We will see a greater number of provisioning systems front end HR systems. This would be a significant departure as most deployments of user management and provisioning have been driven from HR systems.”
[Kearns comment: There will be a lot of changes in the HR software market in the wake of Oracle’s acquisitions. This could be the right time to put identity management in the driver’s seat!]
* “Password policies and management will continue to evolve to a point where advanced uses of technology, such as voice biometrics, will become more common in sensitive enterprise deployments of password management solutions that demand a higher standard of security.”
[Kearns comment: I’ll have something new to say about biometrics next issue.]
Some of what O’Malley’s predicting is no-brainer material, but he has gone out on a limb in other areas. We’ll check back in a year and see how he’s done.
