Screencast of my OpenWorld Session on “IdM and the Cloud”

On Monday, I presented at Oracle OpenWorld on the topic of “Identity Management and the Cloud: Stormy Days Ahead?“. The title proved to be a little too prescient, because the weather in San Francisco was pretty nasty. And as you can imagine, the number of jokes made about this became all to predictable.

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 video (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.