Learn from the Pros at Axiomatics, Sailpoint, Layer 7, and Radiant Logic

Companies today are looking for a comprehensive authorization solution that’s external to applications, resources, and data—and an increasing number of IT organizations are turning to XACML-driven access control. Do you have the knowledge you need to build such dynamic, flexible, and compliant authorization services?

Deliver Smarter, Attribute-Based Access Control

Radiant Logic is co-hosting a series of XACML training workshops across the country. These trainings explore how to integrate your existing identity silos with modern and complex architectures. We’ll also look at how virtual directory services, XML gateways, and access governance complement XACML systems. You’ll come away with real insight into how to achieve policy-driven attribute-based access control using real-time enterprise data, regardless of that data’s location, form, or complexity.

Don’t Miss these Opportunities!

These trainings will introduce XACML concepts and complementary technologies and then take a deeper dive into more advanced topics. All your session materials, meals, and wireless Internet access will be provided.

Get a more detailed agenda and register today.
 
See you at the workshop!
 
-The Radiant Team
 
PS: We’ve run this same series in other cities and it has sold out. If you’re interested in attending, be sure to register soon.

Join Us for the FICAM Kick-Off, March 28, Washington, DC

If you work in identity management for a government agency, you can’t afford to miss this free FICAM kick-off.
 
Join us for an event highlighting the recently-released FICAM roadmap. Take a deep dive into the FICAM guidelines, discuss potential use cases, and gather best practices for implementation. You’ll hear from FICAM gurus Anil John and Deborah Gallagher, and explore how the RadiantOne complete identity service, based on model-driven virtualization, is being used to build the Authoritative Attribute Exchange Service. 

Sign Up Now for this Free FICAM Kick-Off

We’ll begin with a breakfast of croissants and coffee and end with lunch. Along with the speakers, there will be ample time for questions and mingling—and every attendee will receive a ticket to tour the spy museum.

If you’re charged with implementing FICAM initiatives, this is one event you won’t want to miss—we look forward to meeting you at the Spy Museum.

Check out the agenda and be sure to sign up today!
 
See you in DC,
 
The Radiant Team

Radiant Logic’s going on tour! We’re thrilled to announce our 2012 event line-up, with a number of great ways for you to put RadiantOne in your hands, and see what our complete identity service is all about. Check our brand new events page for dates, locations, and registration.

• RadiantOne Trainings: Don’t miss your chance to master the new RadiantOne VDS+, and get practical experience in an instructor-led classroom. This year, we’ll offer our totally revamped trainings in ten different cities, so register for one near you!
• XACML Workshops: Learn how to achieve policy-driven attribute-based access control using real-time enterprise data, with industry leaders Radiant Logic, Axiomatics, Layer 7, and Sailpoint.
• FICAM Event: Work in identity management for a government agency? Learn more about the new FICAM guidelines, potential use cases, and best practices for implementation over free breakfast and lunch at the Spy Museum!

Here at Radiant, we believe that the future’s already here— and we’ll prove that this month when we ship the first release of the RadiantOne Cloud Federation Service, so you can turn your RadiantOne VDS into one connector to the cloud, enabling SSO across your enterprise—and even from an outside device like a smartphone or a tablet. Stay tuned in February to download your free trial!

Instead of defining and maintaining static groups for cloud-based authorization, RadiantOne lets you create new dynamic groups based on existing attribute values, and populate those groups with users coming from multiple sources:

You can also import existing static groups into RadiantOne VDS and remap them to meet application requirements:

RadiantOne can even base your group definition on multiple attribute values—such as department and title—for more finely-grained group definition. Say you want a group for each department in your enterprise. With RadiantOne, all you have to do is create a dynamic group for the attribute “department” and automatically you have groups for your Sales, HR, and Marketing departments, with members coming from across all data stores.

With RadiantOne, it’s easy to leverage your existing data for attribute-based authorization in the cloud and keep those groups up to date automatically.

>> Read our new FICAM white paper and be sure to attend the FICAM kick-off at the end of March.

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.

	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! -Happy Holidays from the Radiant Logic Team

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.

New White Paper:

Secure Cloud Apps without Disrupting Your Enterprise Identity Infrastructure

Discover how a virtual identity service enables you to federate your identity, delivering a single point of access for all your applications, no matter what they do or where they’re located. By delivering identity as a complete, on-premise service, 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.

>> Download

Feature Spotlight:

Add Speed and Scalability with a Persistent Cache

Searching for users takes a lot of time and processing power. To find a user, your client application has to first query multiple backends, navigating many different protocols, and then retrieve the necessary attributes—all while dealing with errors resulting from duplicate accounts. Costly and time-consuming lookups are required for retrieving multiple attributes on the fly, and correlating users across silos can add hours of processing time. This results in glacial performance on essential tasks such as authentication.

However, RadiantOne’s persistent cache guarantees accessibility of data—even when the underlying backend is down, persistently cached views are always available. These views are kept up to date with near-real time cache refresh, with changes being detected via connectors linked to the data sources, so finding your user is a quick, no hassle process.

Challenge: Draining and Costly User Look-Ups

Costly and time-consuming lookups are required to find a user across directories, database, and cloud applications, and especially for retrieving multiple attributes on the fly. This can lead to extreme slowdowns for critical tasks such as authentication.

Round robin is one method to find a user across identity sources. In this configuration, the application checks one backend after the other, resulting in many irrelevant queries and slow response time since the application has to look through each source, one at a time.

Another option is to issue parallel queries, which means that the application searches all data stores at the same time. While it’s much faster than round robin, you’re still overloading your data stores with irrelevant queries. This can overload slower data stores by forcing them to handle the same number of queries as a faster data store that’s optimized for more.

Solution: Advanced Persistent Cache

RadiantOne’s virtual layer offers a smarter, faster alternative, by creating one global list of identities from across all data stores that the client application can query. And, because it’s stored in a persistent cache, one lookup in the global list immediately returns the results, while backends are shielded from excessive queries. A persistent cache means that data is never stale, and attribute joins can be performed on the fly.

A persistent cache enables:

• Guaranteed performance— regardless of the nature and performance of the underlying source.
• Real-time cache refresh based on event detection.
• Complex joins across multiple sources without sacrificing performance.

RadiantOne’s Persistent Cache is a high-performance LDAP directory fully equipped with replication, so finding your user is never a challenge—no matter how many authentication sources you have in your backend. Only RadiantOne enables you to scale to millions of users without sacrificing speed—while keeping all your identities dynamically updated.

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.

The Logon Challenge without a Federated Identity

For most enterprises, the cloud only deepens an existing challenge: how to secure a complex heterogeneous environment with multiple identity sources and applications. As you can see, dealing with n (identity sources) and p (applications) leads to c (chaos):

The answer is to federate identities, creating a central identity hub to give your SaaS applications a single point of access for authentication and authorization.

You Need an Identity Hub—but Where Should it be Hosted?

No matter what the model, everyone agrees: a centralized identity hub is essential for federated identity. The difference is in where it’s hosted. If you’re starting from scratch with a greenfield deployment, it makes sense for identity to be hosted in the cloud—basically, you’re securing your SaaS applications using another cloud-based service that’s contracted out to a third-party vendor. If you’re a smaller organization looking to authenticate against your Active Directory employee base, then federating locally using ADFS (Active Directory Federation Service) might be the best choice—after all, it’s built right in to the system, so it’s cheap and designed to work with your AD.

If you’re like most larger enterprises, however, you already have a complex infrastructure with identities spread across many heterogeneous sources—multiple AD domains and forests, other directories, databases, web services—along with a multitude of legacy applications that rely on those sources. For you, a move to cloud-based identity would be extremely disruptive—imagine cutting down the forest to make room for some seedlings; there’s all sorts of potential there, but meanwhile, you’re getting sunburned—while the use of ADFS would cover only one of the multitude of identity repositories you grapple with every day.

A Federated Identity Service For the Cloud—Not In the Cloud

What you need is a way to federate all your identities, delivering a single access point for all your applications, whether they’re in the enterprise, on the web, or in the cloud. Such an on-premise identity service allows you to authenticate as close to the authoritative sources as possible—and keeps your identity more secure, since identities don’t have to travel across the firewall every time you synchronize user accounts.

With RadiantOne virtualization, you don’t have to uproot your existing infrastructure. RadiantOne delivers a complete, federated identity service that allows your identity to evolve easily with changing requirements, whether that means adding new data sources or applications, expanding your user populations after a merger or acquisition, or extending your identity securely to take advantage of the cloud.

Does a Move to the Cloud Mean a Return to Silos?

In a recent article for Information Week, Michael Biddick questions whether a move to the cloud might just create a whole bunch of new identity silos in your infrastructure. He asks, “So, why are we adopting SaaS at a steady clip if we haven’t found a good way to securely link these apps with one another and in-house systems?” However, with ten years of experience in unifying identity silos, we believe we have the solution.

As the pioneers of the virtual directory, identity integration is our forte—and we know that Saas applications are not all that different. By isolating applications from the complexity of backend sources, RadiantOne’s identity and context service provides a single unified view of customers, employees, and partners. This service is a key enabler for enterprise security initiatives, including Web Access Management, Portal SSO, and Federation—as well as integrating Saas applications into the infrastructure. RadiantOne virtualizes identities out of their backend silos—whether that’s multiple Active Directory domains and forests, databases, applications accessed by a web service, or all of the above—and creates one central, virtual identity hub inside the enterprise where SaaS applications can point.

A two-part solution powers this identity service. The RadiantOne Cloud Federation Service (CFS) together with the RadiantOne virtual directory server, create a one-stop solution to integrate all your enterprise identities, and link them with the cloud. CFS delegates the task of authenticating against all your identity stores to one common virtual layer, and shields your external and cloud applications from the complexity of your identity systems.

RadiantOne’s virtual identity hub creates one secure, virtual point for both on-premise and SaaS applications to access.

Webinar: Achieve Cloud SSO with an On-Premise Solution

With more and more critical applications housed in the cloud, your enterprise faces one central question: How does the cloud fit into our identity management strategy? Instead of reinventing your existing identity system, RadiantOne virtualization gives you an on-premise solution to securely connect with cloud-based applications. Tune in to our webinar on October 13 at 8am PST to find out how RadiantOne virtualization delivers identity as a local service.

Product Highlight: RadiantOne Cloud Federation Service

The new RadiantOne Cloud Federation Service (CFS), powered by identity virtualization, enables SaaS application to access identities across your entire infrastructure. CFS authenticates the user against a variety of sources—including Active Directory, LDAP, databases, and web services—then gathers the requested attributes, and builds a token in the form that the application understands. The result is one secure logical access and audit point to connect all your authentication sources to the growing world of cloud applications.

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.

Part 1: Using Virtualization to Integrate Internal & External Directories

In the first webinar in this series, coming up on February 8, we’ll discuss how the division between internal and external directories as separate identity sources can affect your enterprise, and how virtualization allows you to integrate your competing directory infrastructures.

Forrester analyst Andras Cser and Radiant Logic’s Lisa Grady will demonstrate how externalizing identities through virtualization seamlessly integrates internal and external directories, providing single view of all users for secure authentication, finer-grained authorization, and new context-driven services.

In this session, Lisa and Andras will focus on: 

• The limitations of legacy directories, and why virtualization is an essential tool for future-proofing your infrastructure.
• Why externalized views of identity data enable better authentication and authorization across diverse systems, including cloud-based infrastructures.  
• How model-driven virtualization delivers the views your applications require, while advanced caching gives you the speed and scalability your portal needs.  

Stay tuned for the next installment of our webinar series later this year, where we’ll discuss how virtualization makes it easy to join web services with applications in your enterprise.

Find out more: 

• Register for the February 8th webinar on “Using Virtualization for Seamless Integration of Internal and External Directories.” 
• Check out our white paper on AD to LDAP Through Virtualization.

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.”

The process of federation/integration, Blakley explains, was the cohesive force bringing together both consumer and enterprise identities. Unfortunately, current IdM infrastructure is built for a world that no longer exists – one based on pushing identity from the center, instead of pulling it from many disparate sources. A more flexible solution lies in what Blakley calls a “pure pull” identity management system—one with virtualization at its core.

Identity and Context Virtualization Is Key

Radiant ­Logic’s VP of business development, Dieter Schuller, explains how such a platform can be successfully implemented in an enterprise. By virtualizing identity––as well as user security contexts across application silos––you add much-needed flexibility to complex environments. This enables richer, context-driven authorization and reduces operating costs, while building better relationships with your customers. 

The RadiantOne Identity and Context Virtualization platform streamlines ID management throughout an enterprise, and is also the first solution that makes it easy to deliver context-driven services. Through smart virtualization, companies can deliver both identity and context as a service and create a complete—and completely flexible—IdM infrastructure.

Be sure to check out the “The Emerging Identity Infrastructure” to see for yourself.

• 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!

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.

Where SQL Falls Short: Delivering the Final Experience in Real Time

As we all know, SQL databases offer tremendous flexibility in joins and updates, but can require infinite time and patience to retrieve your data. And in a world where everything—including rich context—will be digital and information will be widely distributed, that’s a real problem. Sure, we could potentially generate every view we want with SQL through distributed joins. But in such a virtual world, the hero of the SQL Holodeck would never get to kiss the girl, because the next image would be frozen in an eternal distributed join. Although many companies keep trying to buy the “ultimate SQL engine,” spending millions of dollars to close the gap, this is just the wrong approach.

Think about the difference between rendering the image for a special effect and then freezing the frame in the final movie—it’s is a whole different set of tools. While SQL is great for “generating the images” offline, you still you need another architecture to deliver the final experience in real time. Hence the emergence of cache, NOSQL, and other alternative models beyond the SQL layer, and the need for another service—a data service, a data cloud—on top of the existing application infrastructure.

The Best of Both Worlds: Identity and Context Virtualization

By virtualizing and caching identities and queries, RadiantOne combines the flexibility of a SQL database with the speed of a directory. Our technology combines the best of both worlds to allow enterprises to link cloud-based and existing infrastructures, and smoothly transition into the cloud.

Jnan also questioned the deployment of the tools that will enable data clouds and context management. Considering that the possibilities border on science fiction, it makes sense to want to see results! However, early adopters such as Sony Electronics and others, as well as many agencies and US government entities—such as the Department of Defense—are already deploying Radiant Logic’s technology to link diverse data sources and provide user information in context.

A Final Point on Scaling and Cloud Deployment

Thanks to native partitioning and replication of the LDAP model, scaling is not an issue. Contrary to a database schema, a hierarchy yields to easy partitioning by design—that’s why DNS and other basic Internet infrastructure scale so well. This what I meant when I referred to “scaling at the SaaS level” during the webinar. However, because we are maniacs for performance—at the end of the day, speed is always linked to higher productivity—we are also looking to push the envelope by combining Hadoop with our LDAP smart cache engine in our next version.

So yes, Jnan is right to stress this point. But when we talk about data clouds, we are not talking only about clouds as an abstraction concept—we’re talking about clouds as a delivery layer. So the discussion encompasses not only SaaS, but also the IaaS part of the story. This picture shows how we see the roadmap for Identity and Context Virtualization in the cloud:

Finally, we’d also like to clarify that despite having a French CEO with a thick accent—who’ll become a US citizen next month!—Radiant Logic is proud to be an American company headquartered right here in beautiful Novato, California. Not that this matters much in a global economy, but we believe in truth in marketing!

Thanks again, Jnan, for your excellent post. Stay tuned for my next blog post, where I will discuss how we can a deliver a context and semantic service for the data cloud on top of your existing infrastructure of data silos.

Whether your enterprise is already benefiting from Radiant Logic’s virtual directory solutions, or you’re still researching the best way to unify your company’s various identity and data platforms, there’s no better place to be than the upcoming Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit, taking place November 15-17 in San Diego. At this year’s conference, our booth will be teeming with RL engineers and executives, who will enlighten your team on the growing identity and context virtualization field.

“Many companies are struggling with the many idiosyncratic representations of information across different data silos,” says Radiant Logic founder and CEO Michel Prompt. “Extracting and externalizing this information through advanced identity and context virtualization is a way to overcome data fragmentation, ensure better security and privacy, and enable new context-aware services.”

Check Out Our New Client Apps!

This time around, we are particularly excited to showcase two new-and FREE –web-based client applications, both of which work jointly with our RadiantOne VDS Context Edition (v. 5.3). ID-Connect is a social networking-based interface that offers user profile management, white pages, and search capabilities that stretch across your entire enterprise. We are also launching the must-have Context Browser. This web-based app enables users to contextually search across locked, structured data from various databases and applications, extracting metadata and configuring it into plain English sentences.

See RadiantOne in Action at the Department of Defense

When it comes to business administration across a myriad of locales and languages, there’s no bigger case study possible than the U.S. government. Don’t miss Mohammed Khattak, Senior Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton, as he describes how the Department of Defense (DoD) used RadiantOne to access and correlate data for more than 4 million listings to create its Joint Enterprise Directory Services (JEDS) contact list. Join the discussion on Tuesday, November 16 at 3:45pm in Marina II.

If you’d like to schedule a one-on-one appointment with a Radiant Logic virtual directory expert, e-mail us your preferred date and time as soon as possible. We look forward to seeing you there!

This year’s Burton Catalyst promises to be one of the best Identity focused events of 2010. I’ve been to every Catalyst Conference since it began, and I think that this year’s agenda-along with our hospitality suite!-are the most exciting ever. Burton made it’s reputation in the identity area and now that they are part of Gartner, they have the resources and clout to really make this something special. Gartner analysts are promising that this year’s event will be the best one ever held-and they’re backing that up with a 100% guarantee on your investment.

Great sessions highlighting Identity and Context Virtualization

This year, we are especially fortunate to have significant support from our customers, partners, and friends who come every year to learn what’s hot in IdM, get updates on products and upcoming releases, and celebrate with us in our suite. Many of our customers will be discussing their successful VDS use cases and deployments.

Don’t miss these sessions showcasing Identity and Context Virtualization:

The Emerging Identity Architecture
(Bob Blakley & Ian Glazer, Gartner/Burton Group)
Wednesday, July 28, 8:40 am

Manage globally, Act locally: How Identity & Context Virtualization Solved Complex Security and Data Integration Issues for Intel Corporation
(Steve Price, Intel Corporation)
Wednesday, July 28, 11:20 pm

Directory Services, Federation, and the Cloud
(Mark Diodati, Gartner/Burton Group)
Wednesday, July 28, 2:00 pm

The Industry Perspective on Cloud-Based Identity Challenges
(Industry Panel)
Wednesday, July 28, 2:35 pm

Leveraging Directory Services Virtualization to Integrate Identities for Enterprise Social Networking
(Ken Durazzo, Cisco Systems)
Wednesday, July 28, 3:10 pm
Backend Attribute Exchange: From Profile to Usage
(Anil John, Johns Hopkins University – APL)
Wednesday, July 28, 4:10 pm
Vendor Lightning Round 1
Wednesday, July 28, 5:05 pm

Join us for free drinks and free-ranging conversation-You could even win an iPad!
I’d like to invite you to visit our hospitality suite on Wednesday, July 28, 2010, 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm on the Aqua Patio.

We’ll be serving up delicious fare and refreshing libations, all with beautiful ocean views and the chance to get updates on ID-Connect, our free social media interface offering user profile management, white pages, and enterprise-wide search capabilities. Plus, the first 300 attendees can register to win one of three iPads and several other prizes.

I’d love to discuss your IdM infrastructure and initiatives
Finally, if you are at Catalyst and would like to meet 1:1 with me for a drink or to discuss your latest IdM initiatives, please shoot me an email at dschuller@radiantlogic.com or call me at 630-810-1294.

Look forward to seeing you in San Diego.
Dieter

For more information, visit http://www.radiantlogic.com/main/ or download a 45-day free trial. Follow Radiant Logic on Twitter and on LinkedIn. Fan us on Facebook.

In his recent paper, “The Emerging Architecture of Identity Management,” Gartner analyst Bob Blakely laid out a roadmap for a new identity management infrastructure. As a follow up, Bob will be joining Radiant Logic’s Dieter Schuller, Vice President of Sales and Business Development, for an upcoming webinar. The two will detail the new infrastructure as recommended by Gartner, and how Radiant Logic identity and context virtualization can help you implement it.

Needed: New Ways to Manage Identity

Over time, it has become increasingly difficult to build an integrated identity structure. As enterprises have added new audiences and acquired new companies, identities can no longer be managed the same way. What used to work-centralized authentication and authorization-no longer serves today’s far-flung, federated, and even cloud-based infrastructures.

The first challenge within such an evolving environment is to integrate identity and context for security and privacy. In order to do this, you need:

1. A single view of identity through integration.
2. A way to externalize security context (or any relevant context) out of existing data/application silos.
3. The ability to join identity and context.
4. And finally, the ability to scale in volume while providing the highest speed.

Until now, this has been an impossible task. But Bob and Dieter will give specifics on how these complex issues can be solved, and the answer is simple: Implement a virtual directory-but not just any virtual directory. You need a solution that will provide full support for an identity and context virtualization service.

Don’t Miss the Webinar!

Our upcoming webinar on July 17^th at 8am PST will cover the new identity management infrastructure and the details for how to implement it within your unique identity environment.

Find out more:

• Read Bob’s Paper “The Emerging Architecture of Identity Management” for more details about the new plan
• Check out our Virtual Directory Buyers Guide for an in-depth look at which virtual directory can address your specific needs.
• Mark your calendars: Don’t miss the Gartner & Radiant Logic webinar on July 17^th at 8am PST.

At Radiant, we’ve known for some time that an overhaul of identity management architecture is required and it’s great to know we’re not alone. Gartner VP and Research Director, Bob Blakely shares our opinion and has even laid out a roadmap for a new identity infrastructure in his latest research paper, “The Emerging Architecture of Identity Management.” We couldn’t be more pleased that someone with such a respected voice-and a Gartner analyst no less!-is sharing the same story we’ve been telling for years. 

The World of Identity is Changing-and Identity and Context Virtualization is Key

Your current identity management infrastructure is built for a world that no longer exists-one based on pushing identity from the center, instead of pulling it from many disparate sources. Today’s centralized identity infrastructure can’t keep up with tomorrow’s demands. Understanding this quandary is critical for you and the future of your enterprise.

Cloud computing, federation, and the need to scale are quickly changing the identity landscape and emphasizing the need for a transformation.

Companies still struggling to solve today’s IdM challenges in their increasingly federated environments are now required to plan and account for tomorrow’s modern architectures, such as user-centric identity, Identity-as-a-service, and the cloud. Current enterprise IdM systems, designed to centralize management of the information used to authenticate employees and authorize their access to enterprise resources, simply won’t get us there. 

According to Bob, the emerging identity infrastructure will be based on pulling identity from disparate sources at the time of use, and it will feature identity and context virtualization at its core-you’ve probably heard us talk about that a time or two! In addition to his recent paper, Bob also laid out his vision of a pull-based identity management architecture at Burton Catalyst EU in Prague at the end of June. Ian Glazer, also of Gartner, recapped it nicely in his blog. 

Join us at Catalyst and Don’t Miss our Upcoming Webinar! 

We’re gearing up for Catalyst North America in San Diego at the end of this month, where we will be showcasing some exciting new products. But before heading down to sun and surf, we invite you to join us for our next webinar on Thursday, July 15^th at 8:00 a.m. PST, when Bob Blakely will expand on his groundbreaking research paper and Radiant’s Dieter Schuller will discuss Identity and Context Virtualization and give some tips on selecting this critical component of the new identity infrastructure. 

Don’t miss this discussion on: 

• Why the current push model no longer works in today’s identity landscape.
• How virtualization finally separates the production and storage of identities from their consumption.
• How explicit context representation and externalization will drive finer-grained authorization and profile management-and change the way you relate to your customers.
• How you can use smart virtualization to deliver identity and context as a service and create a complete IdM infrastructure for all your initiatives.

>> Sign up for the webinar 

Learn more about Identity and Context Virtualization or catch us at Catalyst in San Diego for a demo of our new ID-Connect product. 

Hope to see you there!