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,
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
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
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
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
I have been neglecting this blog for a while, and it took an event of historic importance to pull me out of my reverie and back into the blogosphere. No, I am not talking of the arrival on this earth of Suri Cruise. It was the eagerly anticipated publication of Gartner’s magic quadrant on User
Working as I am on the architecture for the next generation of our IdM products, I found the thesis of this article extremely interesting. It basically uses Windows as an example of how the cost of innovation increases dramatically with any attempt to make that innovation backwards compatible. And points out how Apple tackled a
In an internal memo last October, Ray Ozzie, CTO for Microsoft, wrote, “Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.” Amen to that! That is why the new focus of the IdM groups should
One thing that I found surprising at the CAB was the lack of discussion around SPML. Admittedly, the standard hasn’t made enough progress, and is nowhere near the maturity that (for instance) SAML has achieved. But I would have thought that the need for it would make it a hot issue for those who haven’t
At the end of another customer council meeting, one thing was abundantly clear – our customers have no intention of being faceless names on a list somewhere. They have opinions, they are vocal, and they would very much like to be a part of the development process. Hot button topics were support, roadmap visibility and