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

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

What Is Cloud Computing?

You’d think this would be easy, given how much everyone is talking about it. But a search on google will show you that there is actually a lot of debate on what the term stands for. Cloud Computing is a fairly elastic term that has been shape-shifting over time to encompass more and more disciplines in the area of IT operations. For a detailed explanation, I would suggest checking out this (free) research paper by the Burton Group. For the purpose of my discussion, I am going with the basic view that Cloud Computing encompasses all those *aaS concepts we have been hearing about for years now that allow every single layer in the architecture of an application (including hardware) to be utilized as a service over the internet:

• SaaS (Software as a Service): through which application services are offered (examples abound like Gmail, Salesforce.com, Zoho)
• PaaS (Platform as a Service): through which application platform/middleware services are offered (like the Google App Engine)
• IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): through which underlying computing resources like processing,storage and networking are offered (think Amazon’s EC2)

Gartner has said that there are 5 basic attributes of a cloud computing model:

• It is service-based
• It is scalable and elastic
• It shares a pool of resources
• It is metered by use (aka pay-as-you-go)
• It uses internet technologies

Different Types of Clouds

There has also been some controversy around the concept of private clouds, with different folks defining it differently, or even positing that there is no such thing. I think Private Clouds are real and different from traditional data centers, and essentially refer to cloud computing environments dedicated to a single tenant (thereby not adhering to the sharing attribute). The waters get muddied even further when you bring up the concept of Hybrid Clouds. We’ll see how this is relevant later.

What Does This All Mean For Identity?

When we start to think about applications being delivered over the cloud, or enterprises relying on a cloud computing model instead of a data center model, we start to see certain implications for the identity architecture within.

• What is the identity model for these services? Can it co-exist with the enterprises existing identity model?
• Fundamentally, how will the users of these cloud services authenticate? And how will their access rights be managed and enforced?
• Will the cloud services have access to the enterprise identity stores (that are likely not in the cloud)? Is there a integration approach? Is there a replication strategy?
• What security controls exist around the identity data gathered, stored or used by these cloud services? Will they be in compliance with applicable regulations (like jurisdictional regulations on geographic location of data, PCI DSS) and an enterprises internal controls?
• Who (from the service provider side) will have access to the data? How will that be managed?
• How will the enterprises data be effectively segregated in a shared environment?
• What audit controls exist to allow investigation and discovery?

Generally speaking, the reason companies are considering cloud computing is to avoid the expense involved in building or acquiring the infrastructure, and to some extent managing it. However, without paying attention to the security and governance implications, those cost savings will actually evaporate when they either try to retrofit their existing business policies and controls into the cloud environment, or when they have to deal with the fallout from a breach or issue. I think we’ve all seen this particular movie before, so the question is whether we are paying attention to the lessons learnt. Lets talk about this, and examine how externalizing identity is crucial to making cloud computing viable.

Tags: Cloud Computing, Compliance, IaaS, Identity Services, Oracle_IDM, PaaS, SaaS

As an abstract identity construct, entitlements model whatever it is in an actual system that allows a user to do some well defined thing. As such, it is a fine-grained access management construct, so Ian isn’t wrong about that. But I think Ian’s post misses the power of the entitlement construct, which is what entitlement management products aim to surface.

An entitlement could simply be the permission to access a URL (typical web access management scenario). It could be the permission to click on a menu item in an application (typical application functional security scenario). It could be the permission to access a particular data record in the database (typical data security scenario). Each of these taken individually is a pretty big deal in of itself, but can be handled by products or features that are already available today.

But in a service-oriented world, where multiple applications get chained together to perform the functions behind a single action a user can perform, the entitlement becomes a hugely important construct. Currently, this would require ensuring that the permissions within every single component are properly coordinated to allow this flow to go off without a hitch. It becomes a very complicated permission engineering problem to figure out how the ensure that the function will work in all cases necessary.

Entitlements provides an abstraction and layer of indirection that eases the problem, unifying the access control equation. In an entitlement management based architecture each service, every tier within the service, every layer within the application, can refer back to the same entitlement and entitlement policy to determine whether or not to allow the function to proceed.

And to provide this kind of cross-service access control, an Entitlement Management product like Oracle Entitlements Server provides the ability to define powerful entitlement policies based on identity, role and contextual data. And while XACML is a necessary part of the architecture that enables a complex deployment to occur, it is just an enabling tool, not what defines the feature itself. In fact, XACML does bring its own limitations to a run-time environment.

Entitlement Management is a powerful tool that can simplify the mess of permissions and privileges that are strewn all over the enterprise landscape. When applications were silos, it was sufficient to deploy a provisioning system that could handle the provisioning of access into these black boxes. But with applications transforming into services and becoming increasingly interconnected and interdependent, role and entitlement management become critical pieces of enterprise architecture that help provide critical control, predictability and uniformity to the enterprise.

Tags: Entitlement Management, Identity Services, Oracle_IDM, Service-Oriented Security