Just saw an article over on Network World that Quest Software just bought ActiveEntry from Volcker Informatik AG. From a brief skim of the website, ActiveEntry looks like a heavily MS centric provisioning / workflow system – which sounds quite similar to Quest’s existing Active Roles server product. I haven’t had the chance to play with either technology, but I’ve come across a few companies in Australia running Active Roles server. I imagine Volcker is more active in Germany and Europe, hence a lower profile in Aus.

Dave Kearns’ original article on Network World also mentions they’re a player in the Gartner Magic Quadrant – in the visionaries quadrant which is quite good. I double checked the 2010 user provisioning quadrant thanks to Oracle here. Some of the comments on Volcker to save you a search were:

In the Visionaries quadrant, Volcker Informatik demonstrated noticeable improvement, partly due to:

• Significant innovation in its vision and approach to provisioning
• Improved servicing of its clients (predeployment and post-deployment)
• Its expanded partner base and expanded reach outside Germany

and

German-based company Volcker Informatik has made notable movement in the area of completeness of vision. It consistently provides a combination of innovative architectures and features, as well as a high-touch customer model, to deliver in a number of quality, low-maintenance solutions.

Given the overlap between the products, I’ll be keen to see if / how they’re integrated. On my superficial read of both product sites (emphasis on superficial) I’d say ActiveEntry provides ActiveRoles a shot in the arm for connectors, SPML capability and a virtual directory. There doesn’t seem to be anything around identity analytics.

Regardless, its good to see some investment in the identity space.

A post from: Identity Management

Microsoft announced at the RSA conference that they’re shipping (finally!) the GA version of Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager (FIM) 2010.

We recently deployed an early adopter release of FIM here to synchronise accounts between the various Active Directories in different parts of the organisation and our Lotus Notes infrastructure. That project was kind enough to invite me to sit in on their FIM training course and I was pretty impressed with the product overall.

To get some basic syncronisation happening between a SQL database and an AD in the lab tutorial was actually a very straight forward and easy process – which seemed to be a lot more straight forward to me compared with the older Tivoli Identity Manager and CA Identity Manager products I’ve worked with in the past. This isn’t really a fair comparison though as I’m comparing those older versions which have probably moved on to Microsoft’s brand spanking new version.

There aren’t as many connectors available with FIM compared to other products on the market,  which you sort of expect from a Microsoft centric product (duh, its written by Microsoft). However, it does have very nice, slick out of the box connectors and integration into Microsoft datastores (AD, ADAM, SQL) which you’d expect.

The other main differentiator I feel for FIM would be the GINA extension for Q&A type forgotten password reset. Historically, GINA extensions have been a cross your fingers and hope it doesn’t break affair. With FIM, I would have a higher expectation that this is no longer the case. At least you’d have 1 throat to choke if an MS patch doesn’t play nice with the GINA.

My personal feeling is that we’re approaching a time where large organisations have multiple provisioning solutions catering for different systems. We’re moving away from wanting to pay large $ to integrate and retro-fit identity solutions into business apps. Why not have a Microsoft platform to seamlessly provision into Microsoft apps and an Oracle platform to do the same for Oracle apps? Of course there’s an operational impact but you buy time to market and reduced complexity (within those integrated apps – probably not when the provisioning engines need to talk to each other). Anyone got some thoughts on this?

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I’ll have to look into this further, but it looks like Novell are providing some toolkits to embed identity and access management into internally developed web apps and for those companies building cloud computing apps.

http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/328877/novell_vows_first_identity_management_cloud_virtualized_apps?eid=-100

The upcoming Novell Identity Manager 4 will add the new ability for IT managers embed identity management and other security features into both Web-hosted and virtualized apps, Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian said in an interview last week.

Novell Identity Manager 4 will arrive by the middle of next year. That will work closely with Novell Cloud Security Service, also due in 2010, in order to extend identity and security policies onto apps and data hosted in the cloud.

Not sure if they can really be considered the first to provide these products since Microsoft has had Geneva (now Windows Identity Foundation – WIF) for a while, as well as the multitude of open source IdM toolkits available.

Network world has some good coverage of Microsoft’s WIF announcement.

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Not bad, 3000ft view, approach to getting IdM initiatives off the ground posted over on cio.com.

Four steps to self-funding identity management

Plagiarising Chris with my own 2c, here are the major steps:

1. Education: Identify the key business problems you need to solve.

[AB] In large organisations, there are always people feeling the pain from poor identity life-cycle management practices. You should go and find them – they might even have money. At least you then have ‘real evidence’ of the problem which is good for the business case.

2. Discovery: Identify the business and technical context where labor is being expended and where automation will yield significant returns. For example, are you divesting or growing your staff? Are you retiring infrastructure?

[AB] This is interesting as many organisations don’t seem to worry too much about soft costs such as efficiency if your help desks and access processes are fulfilled internally. However, you might be able to get some big wins if there is a ‘hard cost’ such as where your help desk is managed by a 3rd party and there is a cost per call.

3. Planning: Outline the following:

a. Financial Policies and Constraints: What does it mean when the CFO says “no new projects”? Does he mean no improvements, or no incremental expense or cash funding is available? What are the policies for capitalization? When do you need to attain efficiencies to offset expense without impacting different types of budget cycles?

Read the full article at http://advice.cio.com/chris_sullivan/four_steps_to_self_funding_identity_management

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We’re living in interesting times. With share prices at an all time low for many tech giants, its a great time to go company shopping if you’re big and cashed up. I remember the days when Sun IM was the beez neez of provisioning and identity life-cycle management and IBM Tivoli IM still shipped with “broken equals on” (not my quote).

Nowadays, the world of IAM and their vendors is a very different place. If you read reports published by Gartner, Forrester, et al there isn’t a great deal of difference between the different product suites. In fact, having worked with IBM, CA and Sun suites in the past, I’d confirm this from my own experience. IAM is becoming commodity technology.

Just in case you don’t believe me and still believe “<insert product choice  here> is the best” the 2008 IAM reports from Gartner show IBM’s Tivoli Access Manager products are only mildly ahead in the Web Access Management Magic Quadrant, while they’re almost neck and neck in the User Provisioning Magic Quadrant.

So if IBM buys Sun, what will they do with the competing product stacks? IBM will have a few options I bet you would never guess:

1. Merge the product suites
2. Kill some off
3. Keep both

Number 3 is the least likely to me (obviously). Could you imagine the cost of supporting multiple code based? This will be even more interesting as the Sun suite is almost entirely open source now as IBM will never be able to truly remove a competing technology. However, owning (at least in principle) both technology suites would make IBM the un-disputed leader in installed IAM technology worldwide. But will that be enough to stop the rise of Oracle?

Anyway, I hope the Sun kit still works after they “blue wash” it.

A post from: Identity Management

I’m sure it’s been around for long a time, but I’ve just come across Sun’s Identity Hero game. This definitely provides a chuckle (unless you’re an auditor or responsible for SOX) . Remember not to run over the “disgruntled employees” without an “Access Management” powerup. You’ll loose a life.

I got to level 6 and only saved my company $6815. No wonder IdM business cases don’t get up.

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Thanks to a meeting with a vendor just before Christmas, I recently became aware that there are more open source identity management projects out there than you think (or at least, more than I thought). Some are still in a pretty embryonic stage, but others have been around for a  long time. Who knows, we might even need to jury rig a solution if times get tough.

Here’s the list of open source idm projects that I’m actually now aware of:

• AccessStream
• SourceID (identity federation toolkit from Ping Identity)
  
• OpenID
• Shibboleth
• Bandit Project
• Higgins Identity Framework
• OpenLDAP

And of course there is a whole bunch of stuff from Sun.

Has anyone used these successfully? Are there any others  I’ve missed?

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After days of toil, we’ve finally got the blog live. Identricity.com covers identity and access management news from Australia and around the world.

Where does the name come from? I think the identity part is clear, but well, there are some ‘eccentricities’ in our industry – minor nuances that anyone involved in IdM/IAM/IM projects in large enterprises can appreciate.

Any questions pr suggestions, feel free to ping me on ab@identricity.com or www.twitter.com/adrianbole. Stay tuned!

A post from: Identity Management