Stay Tuned for More Innovations in the Coming Year
You’ve heard us talking about building a federated identity service out of distributed systems, and the critical importance of an on-premise identity hub. Considering the many disparate sources, the multiple authentication and authorization methods, and the diversity of applications accessing this identity infrastructure, we’re going to keep talking about the need for an identity service through 2012. In fact, we’re busy cooking up a new product line-up for next year, combining all the capabilities you need to overcome these challenges—including model-driven virtualization, as well as synchronization and correlation—previously available only through a collection of point solutions. RadiantOne’s new identity service rationalizes your current identity infrastructure, bridging your immediate reality with the long-term option of a hosted solution. With RadiantOne, the future’s built in—so you can face today’s challenges and take advantage of tomorrow’s opportunities.
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Best Wishes in the New Year! It’s that time of year, when we look back at the shrinking budgets and expanding possibilities of 2011, and ahead to the opportunities and challenges of 2012. Thank you for your interest and support over the past year, and here’s to a very successful new year—may it be filled with identity innovations, infrastructure advancements, and high-ROI initiatives! |
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In the News:
Gartner IDaaS Report Includes Radiant Logic
In a recent market profile of Identity Management as a Service (#G00215472), Gartner analyst Mark Diodati identifies a growing movement towards what he calls “the Emerging Identity Bridge.” In Diodati’s words, “While the IDaaS market matures and additional IdM capabilities are supported, the identity bridge will become an important—perhaps essential—component for hybrid deployments. The identity bridge can ‘smooth over’ the differences between on-premises and hosted architectures.” With both directory sync and federation IDP capabilities, RadiantOne can serve as an identity bridge by delivering an on-premise federated identity hub for all your applications—both enterprise and cloud-based.
Identity For the Cloud, Not In the Cloud
It’s no secret that a centralized identity hub is essential for federated identity—but the pressing question is where to host it. In his report, Diodati distinguishes between three use cases where identity management and cloud computing intersect: To the Cloud, In the Cloud, and From the Cloud. He writes, “Today, the primary (and original) deployment model for IDaaS is ‘to the cloud.’ Under this model, the goal is to extend the organization’s existing on-premise IdM capabilities to SaaS and partner applications in the cloud.” If you’re like most larger enterprises, you already have a complex infrastructure with identities spread across many disparate sources—multiple AD domains and forests, other directories, databases, web services—along with a multitude of legacy applications that rely on those sources. For such companies, a move to cloud-based identity would be extremely disruptive—while using only ADFS would cover only one of the multitudes of identity repositories you grapple with every day.
Radiant Logic’s federated identity hub is the perfect choice for organizations that want to leverage IDaaS, but also need to keep user information on-premise. With the ability to aggregate, sync, and correlate identities from across the enterprise and the cloud, RadiantOne’s on-premise identity hub gives you a centralized identity source for all your applications. As an “identity bridge,” RadiantOne federates your identity to deliver a single point of access for all your applications— no matter what they do or where they’re located. Cloud applications can authenticate users against the authoritative sources within your organization—and your essential identity data doesn’t have to cross the firewall every time you synchronize user accounts. RadiantOne is a solution that spans both your immediate reality—a heavy investment in on-premise identity stores—with the long-term option of a hosted solution, so you can begin taking advantages of cloud infrastructures today.
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Connect to the Cloud with an On-Premise Virtual Identity Hub
The big story these days is the move to cloud-based applications that deliver specialized new services without the cost and hassle of developing or managing them yourself. But securing these applications is another story. While the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model is expanding enterprise capabilities, it’s also putting a strain on your existing identity infrastructure.
According to Gartner analyst Greg Kreizman in his paper on Options for Coping with New Identity Islands in the Cloud: “SaaS providers often fail to adequately address enterprise identity and access management (IAM) integration requirements, and customers face increased identity administrative burdens, reduced user convenience, and reduced audit and compliance insight.” In fact, as Kreizman points out, the majority of SaaS apps do not provide ways to leverage established enterprise IAM tools to manage identity and access for cloud applications.
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Whether you’re delivering new services, adding applications, or switching current offerings across new segments of customers and employees, there are constant demands on today’s rigid and fragmented identity infrastructures. Ideally, you could uncouple identity from applications and services, and meet these new requirements as they come up. After all, adaptation and flexibility are the mantra –and only permanent requirement—for business success these days.
However, our current systems of customized and inflexible identity sources, each with its own representation of identities, make it tough to securely deliver services. No matter if your identities are stored in Active Directory, an LDAP directory, a relational database, or an application supported by a web service, you need to flexibly and dynamically repackage and reassign identities to services to accommodate the changing market.
The question then arises: in today’s complicated identity ecosystems, how can you gain an integrated view of users for smarter authentication and finer-grained authorization?
Delivering Identity-as-as-Service through Virtualization
By externalizing and integrating internal and external populations into a single, logical layer, identity virtualization creates a common access point for your applications and portals. You can then separate duties, roles, and functions from the application itself. You can also manage or even modify your identities easily—without disrupting your underlying data structures. With a virtualization layer, your enterprise can quickly adapt to market conditions, and securely extend services to new populations.
Webinar Series: Externalizing Identity for Smarter Security & Services
To further explore how identity virtualization can solve modern infrastructure challenges, we’re launching a three-part webinar series on the ins and outs of offering identity and context into a service. Each installment of the series will wrestle with a specific type of identity integration challenge, and we’ll look at how externalizing identity and context into an interoperable service offers a solution to that particular problem.
Filed under: Active Directory, Identity Integration, IdM Services, LDAP Proxy, Virtualization
Despite a plethora of products and an incredible level of investment in the field of identity management, true enterprise-wide success stories are few and far between. Countless enterprises remain in desperate need of a fix for their IDM infrastructure.
Our recent webinar entitled “The Emerging Identity Infrastructure” attempts to shed some light on the future of identity management for organizations seeking guidance in evolving their infrastructure.
Provisioning Alone, Without a Common Identity Layer, Is Not Working
In the webinar, expert analyst Bob Blakley, Gartner’s VP of research, recounts how provisioning was seen as a godsend until the diversity of identity sources and their rate of change caused havoc with a rigid system that was prepared too quickly. For example, think for a moment about provisioning for a work force made of part-time employees, contractors, and a host of other complicated factors. According to Blakley, the current practice is quickly becoming obsolete, as the separation between data user groups diminishes and the need for a centralized system of authorization and authentication grows.
“The system is broken, and it results in a lot of duplicated work,” says Blakely. “It results in inefficiency in the provisioning process. There are a lot of errors.”
Filed under: Authentication, Authorization, Federation, Identity Integration, IdM Clients / Applications, IdM Services, Provisioning, Virtualization
We’re pleased to announce that Radiant Logic has a new home on the web. Just in time for 2011, we’ve updated our website with tons of new content to help you make the most of our groundbreaking RadiantOne Identity and Context Virtualization platform. Our new site is streamlined and easier to use, so you can find the solution you need based on the challenges you’re facing. Whether you want to:
- Simplify SSO, authentication, and federation.
- Externalize identity from your databases.
- Extend identities beyond the firewall.
- Gather attributes for smarter authorization.
- Search and browse securely and contextually.
- And much, much more…
The updated site makes it easy to see how Radiant can help.
Ramp Up with Radiant at Our Newly Redesigned Site
Find all the answers you need with:
- Clear navigation: Locate the perfect solution organized by the problem you need to solve.
- In-depth content: Select the product that best meets your needs by clicking through our new and improved product section.
- Topic-driven resources: Get the most up-to-date videos, white papers, deployment guides, and free product downloads, so you can try RadiantOne in action.
As you can see, we’ve even updated our blog format, making it even easier to keep up with what’s going on in the world of identity, directory, and context virtualization. So watch this space for more analysis and announcements, along with an occasional dose of philosophy from our visionary-in-chief, Michel Prompt.
Happy New Year from the entire Radiant team!
PS: Got a site you’d like us to add to our blogroll? Let us know!
By Michel Prompt, Founder & CEO
Last week’s webinar on “Data Clouds”, featuring Lyn Robison, Research Director for Data Management Strategies at Burton, is already generating a buzz in the blogosphere. In his recent blog post responding to the webinar, Jnan Dash expertly captured the data cloud concept. Formerly a senior executive at IBM and Oracle, Jnan’s insight into the architecture and potential of data clouds is impressive.
You’ll Need More than SQL in the Cloud
As Jnan mentioned, our background at Radiant is in directories and LDAP/X500. And in a world dominated by SQL and relational databases, one might wonder what a hierarchical data model could bring to the equation. Didn’t we all learn back in Database 101 that relational is the mother of all hierarchies and networks? Of course, I am being a bit disingenuous here, because unless you live on another IT planet, the buzz around an alternative model to straight-jacket SQL is growing stronger by the day. Just look into NoSQL or check out the excellent post in the identity space by my friend Dave Kearns.
Filed under: Cache / Performance, Identity Integration, LDAP Proxy, Michel Prompt, Virtualization
