Matt Flynn brought to my attention an article in which Dale Olds talks about the need for hosters (companies that provide the platform on which you deploy your Cloud/SaaS applications) to provide identity services (and as Matt points out, security services in general) as part of their offering.

<Side Note>No, I do not have a vendetta against Novell, though these last few blog posts may make it feel that way. I actually really like the Novell gang – Dale, Ben and Nick Nichols among others – and for the most part completely agree with their views on identity.</Side Note>

Now, I am with Dale for the first half of the article. Developers of these cloud applications just want to focus on the business logic that is at the core of their service, and not have to worry about the plumbing items, which would include identity management. This is fundamental service-oriented security principles at play, and the survey Dale mentions reflects this (I would argue that even the one-third of SaaS vendors that said they want to handle identity themselves are either saying so because they don’t know what’s involved or are just not happy with what they are getting from the platform and embeddable components). A good set of identity services goes a long way in making applications agile and more acceptable/appealing to customers.

But then the article talks about hosters using identity services as a way to make their platform sticky, because if the platform owns the user accounts for the service, then the service will be hooked. I actually envision the opposite of that when I think of identity services in the platform – identity services making it possible for the SaaS vendor to switch between platforms easily. What is being described sounds like an Identity Provider, which is a business service, not a platform service.

What the platform should provide, and what most enterprise customers would want, is an Identity Hub service, as opposed to an Identity Store service. This allows the customer of the SaaS application to plug it into their enterprise identity store (usually a corporate LDAP system, but it could also be their Salesforce user store) and also accept incoming identities over the wire, while still freeing the SaaS vendor from having to manage identities. In this model, the stickiness for the hoster comes not from owning the user accounts, but from the QoS of the identity services they are providing to their customers (the SaaS vendors and their delegated customers). It also doesn’t force a SaaS vendor to be married to one platform.

Now, I am going to be a little presumptuous here. Having spent some time with Dale, and knowing his past work, I think that he believes in the view I am taking as well. The article seems to be discussing the topic of identity services from a particular angle, which is that there is currently a market opportunity for hosters to leverage the lack of good (non-enterprise) Identity Providers to make their platforms more sticky. It is absolutely true that platforms can (and are actively seeking to) make themselves sticky by owning the accounts; Dale points out that this is exactly what Google did by leveraging GMail as the gateway drug (see, I told you the metaphor works). But as Google seeks to penetrate the enterprise market deeper, even they are recognizing the need to support federated identities as a necessary step for viability. (UPDATE: An old blog post of Dale’s actually clarifies this, and in essence agrees with the view point I am stating here – exactly as I thought he would )

Bob Blakley has long mused about what business models would make Identity Oracle’s viable. And the simple truth is that  platform players like Google or Force.com that can leverage an identity-rich business service that they also have are ideally suited to be trusted Identity Providers. But while a big platform player can certainly be a good Identity Provider, not all hosters should need to be Identity Providers to be successful. Instead, standards based identity services would be a great asset for hosters that want to be sticky (by being the best platform to deploy on) without having to take on the onerous task of being an Identity Provider (which has its own challenges) or passing on those responsibilities to their customers (which is what mostly happens today). And it would be an asset for SaaS vendors that want to have the freedom of choice that we all crave, and that want to be able to work with their customers identity infrastructure. As Dale says in the article:

You see, people can move an application from one host to another without much trouble.

Now, isn’t that a good thing, and something that we should be aiming for?

Tags: Cloud Identity Model, Identity Services, SaaS, Service-Oriented Security

In the podcast, we cover

• What are the key security concerns about cloud computing
• How security requirements vary between Private and Public Cloud models
• Key IdM technologies for securing the Cloud
• The relevance of Service-Oriented Security to the Cloud
• Best practices for approach Cloud Security
• Open standards for the Cloud

And if you’re interested in learning more about Oracle security products, sign up for the newly launched Security Inside Out newsletter, focused on identity management and security topics and products.

Tags: Cloud Computing, Identity Services, Podcast, Service-Oriented Security

OK! So being at a conference (Cloud Computing Expo in NYC, where Oracle is making big waves with announcements in the PaaS space) where I had no wi-fi or power meant that I was trying to follow the big xAuth announcement via Twitter on my iPhone over 3G – note exactly the easiest thing. And after participating in a flurry of twittersations yesterday, I spent time this morning catching up on all the first take blog posts on it. It’s clear that the other word that the ‘x’ could stand for would be “xtremely polarizing” (fine, that’s two words, but since when has that been an issue for Colbert on ‘The Word’!).

I like to think I am a realist, and my initial take on the xAuth idea was that it was a good idea necessary to solve the usability issues holding back the widespread adoption of federated consumer authentication. The usability issue in question is the old NASCAR issue (you can read a good overview of the issue here, but the image below speaks a thousand words) which either causes clutter and user headache, or favors the big players in the IdP space.

Faced with this, you can understand why application developers get all clingy about the old “username-password” form – it’s simple and well understood by users, no matter the security and identity management challenges it creates.

To me the solution is conceptually simple: when I land on a page that supports IdP based authentication, there should be a way for the UI to display just the icons for IdPs that I use. This could be based on (1) my previous usage history across the web, (2) an explicit list I have set up somewhere, or (3) preferences I set up on the RP site the first time I went there. Solution (1) obviously has huge privacy implications, and becomes a non-starter in most discussions for that reason. So I was intrigued when it seemed like xAuth might be tackling approach (2).

Since then my enthusiasm has been dampened a bit after digging a little deeper. And the take from folks I trust in such matters has been cautiously pessimistic. The idea of a central service that any RP can ping to find out what IdP choices to display to a user appeals to me, but the big thing missing from xAuth.org (the proposed central service) are the user protections and controls that I feel are necessary.

• First off, participation must be Opt-In, not Opt-Out (there seems to be universal agreement on this, except from the RPs – as Pamela points out).
• Secondly, the setup should be an explicit white list with layers: Here are the 4 IdPs I’d use by default across the web, but here are 2 more I will consider for specific RPs or classes of RPs (which I could select from a pre-defined list of participating RPs at xAuth.org), and so on.
• And finally, this needs to converge with the Identity in the Browser movement, so as to solve the shared computer as well as the privacy issues (pertinent to unintentional information sharing with the RP) that emerge from this model.

I don’t like dismissing any proposal right off the cuff because of flaws that may not have been worked out yet, so I am hopeful that the energy and discussion I am seeing on xAuth right now continues to push it (or a suitable alternative) in the right direction. At least it has the identity community abuzz, and given the hole that this weeks postponement of Catalyst Europe left in our schedules, that’s a good thing.

Tags: Authentication Services, Federated Consumer Authentication, Identity Services, User-Centric Identity, xAuth

But as Mark also points out, “…it (or something like it) is desperately needed“. Because access provisioning is still the most complicated engagement in any identity management project, and the biggest complexity currently comes from the need to develop, customize, deploy and maintain connectors to hundreds, even thousands of systems. The cloud amplifies the issues to emerge, since without standardization, an enterprise simply will not be able scale out to meet the management needs of their environment.

At Oracle, we have been talking about Service-Oriented Security for a while. The idea is simple – all the security functions, which includes identity management, need to take the form of discrete, easy to consume, standardized services that are part of the platform on which applications are built. This has always been an easy concept to understand when discussing certain service categories like authentication. But provisioning has been a tougher nut to crack.

Provisioning systems today add a vital business process layer to your identity management deployment, dealing as they do with the lifecycle management of identities and the orchestration of policies, rules and workflows around that. So even in a future where architectures will rely on the “pull” model (as Bob Blakley has been talking about), there will be a need for the more complex applications to interface with a provisioning service (different from the attribute service use case) to deal with lifecycle management issues around application access. This is where we believe the next iteration of SPML (however radically different it looks) needs to fit in. This idea is illustrated in the figure below.

This is one of the challenges we have been trying to solve as part of our Fusion architecture project. Do we have it solved? Well, we’ve started the journey at least. Asking applications to come around to a new architecture and way of thinking takes time. And we have to remember that there are still a lot of applications that will not be dropping their user tables and identity silos any time soon, so we have to be mindful of accommodating those applications as well.

Is SPML on life support? Not quite, judging from all the RFP requests that still ask for it to be supported. But it desperately needs some energy to be put behind it. And it needs to adapt to these new architectures, new use cases and the ecology of standards that is far out-pacing it. I believe Oracle (led by folks like Prateek Mishra) will be looking to take some leadership in the evolution of the standard. Let’s see if we can turn things around.

Tags: Identity Services, IdM Standards, Provisioning, Service-Oriented Security, SPML

Unfortunate coincidences on the title aside, the overall response to my session was quite positive, especially from folks whose opinions I really respect like Bob Blakley and Lori Rowland from the Burton Group. There was general agreement that widespread adoption of Cloud Computing is going to be a major disruption on the existing evolutionary path that Identity Management has been following. And adoption of the Identity Services model is a major component to readying IdM for the Cloud.

Check out the screencast (slides with audio of the session) of my session below. Registered attendees of OpenWorld can download the presentation itself and the MP3 audio recording of the session from OpenWorld On-Demand (just login with the Username and Password you created during your OOW registration).

The audio includes the questions that were asked of me, and turns out that the questions didn’t record well and I forgot to repeat them. Hopefully my answers are cogent enough that you get an idea of what questions were asked. I did want to follow up here on this blog post a few of those answers:

• A question came up regarding the licensing terms for Oracle IdM products when they are being used in a cloud environment (specifically, by organizations that are going to be Cloud Providers of Identity Services). The biggest challenge for such organizations is that they cannot accurately estimate the number of users, or other such variables licensing is typically based on, beforehand, which creates uncertainty for them as to the cost they will have to bear. After the session, I confirmed with our PM team that there is special licensing available for ISVs. Talk to your Oracle sales rep about this if interested.
• Another question came up regarding the impact of all this on standards like SPML. I believe my answer covered my opinion on the greater emphasis the cloud identity model will put on the evolution of these standards, especially SPML, which has been languishing. Follow up conversations with some of the original architects of the SPML standard and others involved in standards efforts brought up that the communities responsible for these standards are looking at this very hard and are gearing up efforts to address this. So stay tuned for more on that.
• A question was asked regarding Just-In-Time Deprovisioning of access to cloud-based assets. This is something I discussed quite a bit in a blog conversation with folks like Ian Glazer and Pam Dingle a while back. So check out that post and the related thread.

Tags: Cloud Computing, Cloud Identity Model, Identity Services, OOW09, Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle_IDM

• Session ID: S309525
• Location: Moscone South Room 308
• Date and Time: 10/12/2009 | 11:30am-12:30pm

Below is the abstract for the session, in which I plan on expanding a great deal on the presentation I did in the webinar with KuppingerCole:

Cloud computing is about to revolutionize enterprise IT and architecture. But leading industry analysts see security as a gating factor preventing enterprise adoption of cloud solutions, as enterprises grapple with the unique characteristics of cloud security and the challenges of compliance and governance. This session outlines key identity management considerations for evaluating a move to the cloud. It discusses how enterprises can leverage their existing identity and access management infrastructure and the principles of service-oriented security and standards-based interactions to secure their assets in the cloud. It also looks at the prospects for identity management as a service and how it will affect cloud computing’s future.

As I prepare for my talk, I found myself revisiting some of the previous talks I gave at OpenWorld the last few years. It was very interesting to see how my vision for Identity Services has evolved over that time. I found it a most amusing exercise, so I thought I would extend the courtesy to my readers. To that end, I have uploaded my previous OpenWorld presentations to my Slideshare page (you can also get to them from the links on my Speaking page). I can’t believe I thought the Love Guru angle was a good one to take for a tech talk

If you are going to be attending OpenWorld, you can pre-register for my session using the Schedule Builder tool for OpenWorld attendees. And as always, ping me on email/LinkedIn/Twitter if you want to meet up that week. Look forward to seeing you there.

Tags: Cloud Computing, Identity Services, OpenWorld, Oracle OpenWorld

It started off with Martin Kuppinger talking about his views on cloud computing and identity management. I then spoke for about half an hour on how I think cloud computing will disrupt traditional enterprise identity management – but in a good way.

Enterprise IdM, Interrupted

More than anything else, cloud computing is going to accelerate the evolution of identity management to a services-based model. I have, of course, been talking about identity services on this blog and at OpenWorld and other forums for quite a while now. But the need for good security and controls in the completely elastic, plug-and-play world of the cloud mandates that identity be externalized into an infrastructure layer.

I wish we had left more time for questions during the webinar, because I would have loved to hear from folks about their thoughts on the topic. Hopefully there will be a chance for discussion when I speak on this at Oracle OpenWorld (session details below). In the meantime, check out the webinar recording or my deck. And as always, I encourage you to leave me some comments.

Identity Management and the Cloud: Stormy Days Ahead?

Session ID: S309525 | Moscone South Room 308

10/12/2009 | 11:30am-12:30pm

Tags: Cloud Computing, Identity Services

The webinar is today, Monday Sep 21st, 11 am EST (yeah, I know, short notice. But hey, if you were following me on Twitter…). You can register for the webinar (it’s free!) here.

And if you miss it, it will be available as a podcast later.

Tags: Cloud Computing, Identity Services

The Cloud Hanging Over Us

At Catalyst, Dan Blum stated that cloud computing is not ready to be a serious player in the enterprise when it comes to applications that handle sensitive data (some would argue that covers most enterprise apps). This reflects the biggest obstacle facing cloud computing acceptance – Trust. Enterprises need to be able to rely on cloud providers (read: have SLAs) for availability, security, performance, governance and privacy. But how can they do that when there are so many unanswered questions (as I pointed out in my previous post) and a lack of transparency on the part of the cloud providers? How can an Enterprise feel comfortable when Google says “The service is neither designed nor intended for high risk activities” or Amazons contract states “We are not responsible for any unauthorized access to, alteration of, or the deletion, destruction, damage, loss or failure to store any of, Your Content (as defined in Section 10.2), your Applications, or other data…”

Looking at the Silver Lining

When people talk about the business drivers for cloud computing, it is often summed up as the following list: Cost, Flexibility, Simplicity, Availability. But why not Security? Cloud architecture actually lends itself to a far more robust and reliable security architecture than anything that has come before. Everything can be built right into the platform and the applications, and the need for vendors to support multiple customers in a dynamic environment means that all of it has to be standardized and easy to put up/take down.

So what are the major identity management pieces in this puzzle?

• Federated Authentication that spans the enterprise environment and the cloud environment
  • Alternatively (or additionally), consider supporting User-Centric Identity
• Strong User and Access Lifecycle Management (Provisioning/De-Provisioning Capabilities)
• A Claims-Based Authorization model, coupled with strong XACML-based Entitlement Management
• Enterprise Identity Providers protected by IGF-style policy controls
• DLP (Data Leakage Protection) tools that protect sensitive data moved to the cloud
• A standardized Audit Framework for creating, managing and analyzing audit trails across cloud services

In my follow-up posts (and in the talks I am giving), I will look at each of these in more detail. In the meantime, register for the KuppingerCole webinar I’ll be doing and lets exchange some thoughts.

Tags: Cloud Computing, Federated Identity, Identity Services, User-Centric Identity

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