Author: Nishant Kaushik

Defining Role Management – Part 3

I received a very interesting observation from Mark MacAuley (http://identitystuff.blogspot.com) in response to my last post about role management. Another thought here – how does an organization engineer out laziness? In a former position I was doing implementations of (unnamed) product and inevitably when the topic of roles came up I saw just about everything

Before we can have user-centric identity in the enterprise…

…we need to understand what user-centric identity is. That is the current state of discussion in the identity community. Many people are debating what user-centric identity is. Is it an architecture, is it a design philosophy, or is it a set of business agreements governing user interactions in certain systems? During the course of the

Emerging from the depths

It has been quite a while since my last post. The period coming out of Catalyst is always busy, as it tends to generate a lot of good discussion that starts influencing the work we are doing. I have been neck deep in discussions over the future of our product offerings, so this has been

Where does User-Centric Identity fit into the Enterprise?

One area that I have been paying a lot of attention to recently is the scaldingly hot area of user-centric identity. No other area in identity management is generating as much interest in the community. While this is extremely gratifying (because the ultimate goal is to make our lives better and more secure, and who

Catalyst is the place to be if you care about Identity

Burton Group’s Catalyst Conference is one of the biggest technology events in North America, and is being held in San Francisco this week. If you care about Identity, it is one of the premier conferences to attend, because the conference usually fosters some really in-depth discussions into topics that are at the forefront of the

Phil Becker identifies the top 5 Identity Fallacies

Phil Becker has written an interesting series of articles about the top 5 fallacies which appear and reappear in identity discussions, technologies and deployments. It makes for pretty interesting reading, so check it out at the Digital ID World Blogs. I wanted to comment on fallacy #3: Centralized Management Means Centralized Data. In his article,

Defining Role Management – Part 2

In part 1 of this multi-post blog, I laid out what I believe are the various disciplines that make up a complete role management solution. In this post, I will tackle the more contentious discipline – that of role definition. Fundamentally, two camps have evolved around different approaches to the problem of defining roles. There

Reading the Information Security Breaches Survey

PwC recently published the “Information Security Breaches Survey 2006” report, sponsored by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) in the UK. The 8th such survey is aimed at raising awareness among UK businesses of the risks they face in the internet age. Below are some highlights from my quick read through it, and some

Defining Role Management – Part 1

The topic of role management is always an interesting one to debate. Everyone’s take seems to be slightly different; so much so that if you listen to enough people, you end up trying to rationalize a rather broad spectrum. I recently spent some time having a rather animated discussion on the topic with someone who

Analyzing Microsoft’s approach to provisioning

Gartner’s MQ report on provisioning calls out the different approach that Microsoft has taken to the provisioning space. Termed the “enterprise access management” approach, it essentially advocates the externalized authn and authzn model that requires less pushing of data into target system repositories, and more pulling of data by the target systems from MIIS at