Day 2: Lets get back to basics

The first half of Thursday was focused on enterprises looking for ways to achieve efficiencies and ROI through their IdM deployments, an outcome that had lost its relevance in the rush to achieve compliance objectives. But the current economic climate, and the slew of M&As (mainly As) and layoffs has brought this to the forefront once again, and sustained market interest in IAM when other initiatives are being pared back.

The day was a very good one for hearing about how customers were leveraging their IdM deployments in creative ways.

• I heard some interesting use cases of how Virtual Directory was being used to achieve efficiencies.
  • Companies are using Virtual Directory to expose the same identity data in different forms for different use cases.
  • The presenter from Sony talked about using Virtual Directory on top of geographically local LDAP servers to provide global access to data while satisfying their data compliance needs.
• There were a couple of sessions on managing UNIX infrastructure via AD (which is when I ducked into the cloud computing track).
• Wendy Booker of SunTrust Banks described how they used the cost savings (which they had to demonstrate and prove) from their IdM deployment to self-fund their project, which was a story I am sure more than a few attendees were interested in.

What I found really great was that a lot of the sessions were presented by organizations that had moved on to the 2nd or 3rd phases of their identity management program rollouts. This is quite different from all the previous conferences (Catalyst and others) I have been to, and speaks to the maturity of the market and some of these deployments.

The second half of the day was focused on identity transparency and governance. One of the most important points of the conference was made by Chris Howarth in his excellent kickoff talk, when he said that identity management must facilitate both hierarchical organizations that are necessary to implement enterprise controls, and social networks that are necessary for collaboration to take place. A lot of the discussion in the following talks were focused on the need to increase transparency with respect to how identity data is used, managed and secured to allow for accurate risk assessment and compliance to take place (echoing what was discussed in the cloud computing SIG). And increased transparency only works when complexity is reduced (preventing opacity from just being replaced by obscurity), an architectural requirement that aligns nicely with the identity services vision discussed on day 2.

Day 2 ended with the second night of hospitality suites, including Oracle. We got such a crowd in the Oracle suite that I barely managed to leave it for a few minutes to meet up with some old friends and colleagues in the other suites. And I made some good friends that day (and into the night – not a topic for this blog). I will say that celebrating Ian Glazer’s birthday at a speakeasy called Prohibition was very cool, even if they didn’t ask me for the password.

Day 3: Identity and Privacy are Blood Brothers

Day 3, while just a half day, still packed a solid punch with lots of intellectually stimulating discussion on the topic of privacy. Ian Glazer made a good point at the start of the conference when he said that the identity community is uniquely qualified to deal with the emerging privacy issues. And the sessions on Friday laid out exactly why. The key point made was that Security (making it difficult to get to something you shouldn’t have access to) should not be confused with Privacy (making it easy to get to something you should have access to). They are related, but not the same thing.

Robin Wilton gave an inspiring talk in which he laid out a framework for having productive privacy discussions with the multiple stake-holders involved. He arrived at this framework by analyzing the results of a series of round table discussions held around the globe as part of the Liberty Alliance Privacy Summit to get contextual understanding of privacy. Robin laid out a “Ladder” framework (Philosophy | Strategy | Implementation | Technology) that helps the parties involved focus on the use cases and issues to resolve. I hope he makes his presentation publicly available in some format in the future, because really is a great piece of work.

Bob Mocny, Director of the US-VISIT program, talked about some of the identity and privacy issues involved in running the single largest biometric authentication program in the world. One of the key takeaways from his and the follow-up sessions was the need for organizations to implement privacy audits as separate programs from their IT-Security audits.

Heidi Wachs, Directory of IT Policy and Privacy Officer at Georgetown Univ, gave an interesting talk about the lessons learned during Georgetown’s efforts to  handle a privacy breach. What I found fascinating was how they went about trying to create and enforce a policy on the use, collection and retention of SSNs. Their findings on how far the data was “leaking”, how hard it was to track down all the possible data flows, and how users went to great lengths to hide their mistakes were a lesson that every enterprise should be aware of. It also highlighted the challenges the extended enterprise, working with business and IT partners and services providers, faces in locking down privacy issues.

The day ended with Google talking about how they protect the privacy of their users. It may have only been a half-day, but the quality of content made it a fitting way to end a thought provoking conference. Look forward to what the next one has to bring.

Tags: Breach Remediation, Burton Catalyst Conference, Catalyst09, Identity Governance, Ladder Framework for Privacy, Privacy, Privacy Audits, Virtual Directory

Day 1: A focus on IdM evolution

I don’t know if this was par for the whole conference, but at least in the IdPS track, each half day was devoted to a particular theme. The first half of day 1 was a landscape update as usual, and focused on some of the interesting developments in the space, like Oracle’s pending acquisition of Sun (that’s all I’m going to say on that topic), the integration of DLP (data leakage prevention) with IdM programs, and the emergence of some commercial Identity Oracles.

I especially liked Bob Blakley’s discussion on Identity Services, since it resonated with a lot of what I have been talking about on this blog and the work I have been doing at Oracle. In his talk on the subject, Bob pointed out that cloud-based identity services will challenge the fundamental architectural notions of IdM infrastructure. The large blocks of IdM functionality that we are used to – access management, provisioning etc – will get broken down into smaller, modular pieces – like identity proofing, enrollment, identity risk assessment, breach remediation – that can interplay within enterprise environments as required. This is pushing the market towards smaller, specialist vendors that handle specific services rather than the large IdP that is a one stop shop for all identity needs. And these services have to work in concert with each other to provide the enterprise the value they are looking for. The vendors that have emerged in this space are delivering their services via various deployment models – ranging from on-premise SaaS to cloud-based services – but mostly stick with the per-user/per-transaction billing model. And all of them are going to get a big push when some of the cloud security issues currently holding enterprises back get resolved.

The second half of the day focused on a big part of IdM’s evolution – the mainstreaming of role management and the ascending discussion on the nature of Entitlement Management. Role Management is now widely accepted as an important part of any comprehensive identity management practice, and Kevin Kampman’s talk on the subject highlighted the importance of positioning it as a business problem instead of a technical problem. In discussing the results of a survey Burton conducted with customers that did role management projects, Kevin laid out the premise that the tools are actually secondary when it comes to implementing role management. First and foremost is the need for customers to understand the business processes that impact the design and use of roles, and document the same so that a practice could be built around them.

And as role management has taken hold in the conscious of IdM practitioners everywhere, entitlement management is rearing its head as a disruptive topic. In what was a theme for the conference, Burton laid out a terminology issue that exists around the term “entitlement management”, which is often used to describe tools that deal with runtime evaluation of fine-grained authorization decisions (like what Oracle Entitlement Server does), and neglects the lifecycle management practice around entitlements and their assignments. As customers dig deeper into their role management projects, they are finding that what they really want to do is entitlement management. And the tools to help with the lifecycle side of this equation are just not there.

The day finished at the hospitality suites, where a lot of the evolution being discussed here was on display. There was also a very successful interoperability event demonstrating SSO for cloud-based applications, a first step towards management of the extended cloud-based enterprise by enterprise IdM deployments. All in all, day 1 was quite satisfying. But the best was yet to come.

Tags: Burton Catalyst Conference, Catalyst09, Entitlement Management, Identity Services, Role Management

The SIG Meetings

For me, the conference was divided into two parts. Monday and Tuesday I attended a few SIG meetings on topics that were varied yet highly interconnected. Monday was a meeting of the Concordia Workshop, which is now a discussion group under the new Kantara Initiative. The focus of the meeting was Use Cases driving Identity in Enterprise 2.0: The Consumerization of IT. The ever intrepid Eve Maler has posted materials from the day to the Concordia site, so you can check them out yourself. While the individual discussions covered all manner of areas, the connecting thread throughout was Authorization. There was a morning discussion where a panel talked about the progress made in the authorization space, from the XACML API contributed to the TC by Oracle and Cisco, to the emergence of AuthZ as the critical service in the identity services reference architecture being developed in the Burton Group ISWG (which I have been participating in and writing about). Mike Gotta and Alice Wang gave an excellent talk on the emerging concerns regarding social tools in the enterprise, and a lot of those concerns again boil down to authorization issues, in this case regarding data and information. Eve talked about her work on the ProtectServe protocol that enables authorized data sharing from a user perspective. And the day finished with a talk on Levels of Assurance, a critical piece in allowing for partners to make informed authorization decisions.

Tuesday started with a meeting on Cloud Computing Security and Identity Management. As readers of my blog/twitter know, I have been saying for a while that cloud computing is going to have a major impact on the identity management business, in much the same way that compliance concerns did a few years ago. It is probably a sign of the immaturity of the market that the discussion was focused on describing the challenges to be solved rather than any solutions.

The meeting included a deep dive presentation by Liam Lynch, Ebay’s Chief Security Strategist, on how the auction giant tackles their internal cloud computing needs. There were a few points made during his presentation that I found interesting:

• eBay is into cloud computing as a provider, not a consumer, since they allow 3rd party developers to create their own auction sites on eBay infrastructure using a development kit called eBox
• As such, eBay feels that security considerations have to be made inherent in cloud architecture as they cannot rely on these 3rd party developers to not make mistakes
• eBay uses contextual behavior and reputation, including biometric analysis, as the underpinnings of its identity management strategy. Reputation and behavior analysis generate (over time) dynamic identity claims that then get used in access control decisions
• eBay found RBAC to be a bad match for their performance requirements, and shifted to a claims-based model for authorization. In this model, claims are attached to the data object being accessed itself (sort of a next-generation ACL). The access then compares the claims the actor has at runtime with these to make an authorization decision.
• Liam made the point that managing access through roles was a bad model for them, which is why they went claims-based. I understand the performance concerns that arise when evaluating RBAC at runtime, but for managing the grants of access, nothing beats a role-based model. So I was a little surprised by his statement. When I dug deeper, it turned out that they simply replaced RBAC with Organization-based AC, and not because of performance reasons but because of compliance reasons since the org change has approval attached while the role change did not. So it wasn’t really an issue with RBAC, just the implementation they had in-house.
• Liam pointed out that a move to the cloud can be an opportunity to fix broken internal processes, since the cloud will amplify any issues you may have

The meeting also had Nils Puhlmann, co-founder of the Cloud Security Alliance, speaking to the participants on the need to come up with a practical security checklist that all Cloud Service Providers could be measured against, so that enterprise customers can make accurate assessments of the risk with using a particular CSP. He called for greater vendor involvement and focus on the cloud, since the cost dynamics of the cloud make adoption inevitable. And that CSPs need to be more transparent about their security controls and policies.

Later that afternoon I attended the next meeting of the Identity Services Working Group that I’ve been participating in. There were a lot of new folks in the audience, so it was a good opportunity to recruit new blood into the effort. As Kevin Kampman presented the work that had been done previously on the Authentication service and laid out the effort lying ahead on the Authorization service, we got into highly spirited, and productive, discussions on the nature of the services architecture. One of the points made repeatedly (and which was echoed later in the week during the sessions) was the terminology issue that plagues the identity community, in this case around words like Policy (vs. policy). There was a strong sentiment from the group that policy management needs to be made part of the overall framework for it to work properly. And there was also a strong push from the group to try and condense the best of the prior efforts at defining AuthZ services into our vision.

While on the surface all of these SIGs were on different topics, I found them to be highly intertwined. Identity concerns in cloud computing are tied in directly to the need for an identity services architecture that allows cloud services to leverage enterprise identity (and therefore security) apparatus, thus reducing risk for the enterprise and providing compliance with both internal and regulatory controls. And Enteprise 2.0 is mostly about the intrusion of  cloud-based services like social media into the enterprise environment (or the extrusion of the enterprise into commercialized IT services, depending on how you want to look at it), where concerns about consistency of identity and controls are foremost in the minds of CIOs and CISOs everywhere. So while the discussion is still somewhat fragmented (as it probably should be at this time), I look forward to all of this coming together nicely in the future (maybe even at a future Catalyst conference).

I think I need to do a better job breaking these posts into smaller, more readable chunks. My next post(s) will focus on the sessions themselves.

Tags: Authorization, Burton Catalyst Conference, Catalyst09, Cloud Computing, eBay, Identity Services, Kantara Initiative, Oracle_IDM, Project Concordia