* It's a small world in identity management
John Guare’s play “Six Degrees of Separation” posits that we are all connected by six or fewer stages of circumstance or acquaintance. As one writer explains:
“If I were to run into Elvis in the Grant Line Road Kroger store’s produce department, we’d hardly be to the dairy case before establishing that he was in King Creole with (1) Dolores Hart, who was in Where the Boys Are with (2) Paula Prentiss, who was in Catch 22 with (3) Richard Benjamin, who was in a remarkably brief TV series, Quark, which featured (4) the Barnstable Twins, whose grandmother, (5) Ellen Haverly, gave a pressure cooker to (6) me as a wedding present. Voila! Only six degrees separate the King and me!” (https://www.louisville.com/loumag/mar/bacon.htm)
The theory played out for me over the past week. Approximately 10 days ago, I was speaking to Consul Risk Management Chief Technologist, Kristina Lovejoy. Among the things we discussed, Lovejoy brought up Consul’s philosophy that knowing Who, What, When and Why an event occurred is intrinsic to regulatory compliance reporting. That, of course, refers to what I’ve called Context Based Access, an idea that I’ve floated a number of times but which also was featured prominently in Archie Reed’s electronic book “The Definitive Guide to Identity Management”.
A few nights later, I had a conversation with Reed, formerly with Critical Path and TruLogica and now director of strategy at HP (TruLogica’s new owner). Shortly thereafter, while talking with MaXware Director of Worldwide Marketing Ira Horowitz, I learned that HP had licensed MaXware’s Identity Center provisioning product to supplement its own identity management offerings.
Provisioning reminded me of Courion, whose recently released ComplianceCourior product (see https://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/dir/2004/0719id1.html) is based on technology licensed from – Consul Risk Management. It is, indeed, a small world.
Consul, by the way, is a well-established security organization whose expertise in the field of digital auditing has attracted the attention of many players in the identity management space that need to structure a complete regulatory compliance solution. Those of you with older, or “roll-your-own,” identity management would do well to investigate Consul’s Consul Insight Suite. While compliance might not be an issue with you today, it will be very soon.
Reed, who was TruLogic’s vice president of strategy when the company was acquired by HP, tells me he now spends most of his time patiently explaining to the (mostly) hardware company’s clients and partners what identity management is, why it’s important and how they can go about implementing it. Hmm, “what,” “why” and “how” – sounds like context to me.
MaXware’s Horowitz wanted to remind me (so that I could remind you) that it offers both virtual directory and metadirectory services and that the two offerings are built on entirely separate code bases. It’s not simply a question of storage (i.e., metadirectories include a datastore while virtual directories are join engines pointing to various datastores) but the basic architecture is different, as it should be to get the most out of each product. Horowitz had another concept to float, but I’ll get to that in the next issue. Hurry back.
CORRECTION: Since this newsletter was mailed to subscribers, we have been notified of some clarifications to this story: Courion and Consul have a business relationship to cross sell each other’s products; HP is using MaXware’s ExpressSync product as part of its hosted e-mail archiving solution.
