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With the market in turmoil and the economy slowly recovering, enterprise IT has been on the defensive, focused on retrenchment instead of re-engagement. Within the field of IAM and security, this has meant a heavy focus on GRC (governance, compliance, and regulation).
But sometimes, the best defense is a good offense. We have to fight the FUD and build better solutions to address the needs of our customers. While GRC is important, identity initiatives built solely around regulating internal users deliver only part of the value of Identity and Access Management—If we want to see profitability and growth again, we have to think, innovate, and act.
That means forward-looking identity strategies that focus outside the firewall, taking the opportunity to engage customers, strengthen relationships, and offer high-value new services. But delivering on this vision for customer-centric IAM isn’t easy—especially in today’s high-volume, distributed, heterogeneous environments.
And that’s why I’m so excited by our new approach to IAM. Identity and context virtualization helps you manage globally and act locally when it comes to your identity resources—so you can deliver on externally-focused, high-ROI initiatives such as WAM, Federation, SaaS, and the Cloud.
>> Check out my latest blog post for more details.
Vendor shake-ups: How the Sun acquisition affects your directory infrastructure Now, don’t mistake me for a Pollyanna: when I look at the IAM landscape—and more specifically, at the directory—there are good reasons to worry. A key part of the identity infrastructure is getting old, and on top of that, industry consolidation is only adding to the confusion. Take, for example, Oracle’s Sun acquisition.
Everyone has a thousand questions—but there are no real answers yet. From an identity perspective, many of our customers are wondering:
But pain is often an opportunity for positive change. You need to know how you can invest to protect and strengthen your identity infrastructure. And you should look at a solution that’s more than just a repeat of the past; a plan that positions you well, no matter what decisions are made in days to come. We believe you should consider virtualization—in the form of RadiantOne VDS—as a way to shield your applications from sudden change.
>> Read Dieter Schuller’s analysis of the Sun/Oracle story.
>> Watch our videocast and see how RadiantOne can help.
The rise of AD: Integrating your internal and external user infrastructures It’s essential to remember that having a vision for the future does not mean ignoring the here and now. Active Directory is now dominant for storing internal identity in the enterprise, being the defacto component for most network and messaging initiatives. Unfortunately, integrating AD with your external identity infrastructure has long been a complex and risky task—but it doesn’t have to be.
Advances in virtualization and context representation can provide you the tools to leverage your AD infrastructure outside the Microsoft-centric world. Now you can virtualize both internal (AD) and external (SunOne) populations into an identity service that supports LDAP, as well as SQL and web services. So you’re free to access identity and check credentials from one source and store/create into any other. This keeps your expenses down and leaves you with a future-proof infrastructure.
>> Read our Ad2Sun whitepaper to learn how RadiantOne helps you integrate your infrastructures and make the most of your AD investments.
Everyone’s talking about “the cloud.” Here’s how we can contribute. Cloud computing is the buzzword of the day—that’s where everyone’s applications will reside in days to come. No matter which services you deliver, your target is still the largest possible population. But how will you manage multiple identities belonging to multiples constituencies in highly distributed and heterogeneous environments like the cloud?
Well, not to sound like a broken record, but we believe the key is virtualization based on the principle of manage globally, act locally. Of course, it stands to reason you’ll need a global view of the identities—and that’s what “manage globally” is all about. But what do we mean when we say “act locally”? Basically, that even if you’re offering services to a crowd, they need to be delivered as a one-to-one experience. So you can’t centralize identities—instead, you must delegate, delegate, delegate.
This is a big topic, and we’ll dive deeper in future issues of this newsletter. In the meantime, check out one very tweetworthy way that we’re enabling cloud-based initiatives today.
>> View this demo to see how VDS helps pull information from Twitter to enable product promotion within your applications.
Thanks,
Michel Prompt |
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