THEME: Identity Management: Are We There Yet? Topics

Identity Market Overview

The identity management (IdM) market has seen tremendous growth in recent months. This competitive market is primed for consolidation as marquee vendors dominate market share and smaller vendors are being acquired or are exiting the market entirely. Despite the volatility of the market, IdM technologies have flourished. Even the most conservative organizations have made investments in traditional IdM technologies. However, today’s IdM technologies are focused on solving enterprise-scale problems using a centralized control model. The market is demanding better solutions that support an open, scalable model which is capable of supporting customers, partners, consumers, and employees on a broader, internet-scale.

SharePoint: Fixing A Hole Where the Pain Gets In

Companies that need to collaborate across business boundaries face difficult challenges when using traditional domain-centric collaborative tools. Case in point: SharePoint. For best results, SharePoint requires all users and resources to be part of the same AD forest. Most organizations don’t have that luxury. Attendees of this topic will

• Hear first hand from Microsoft and federation vendors how to connect business partners with SharePoint, Exchange, and other collaborative platforms
• Influence vendor roadmaps by providing direct feedback
• Learn about claims-based architecture
• Listen to customers’ perspectives on SharePoint deployments to find out what’s working well, but also where the remaining holes are and how organizations are filling them
• SharePoint’s current and likely future roles in enterprise content and record management
• The SharePoint market competitor/complementor landscape

Identity and Society

Identity systems are applicable to a wide range of societal interests, in both public and private sectors. Governments are looking to online identity systems to help control borders, fight crime, and provide government services. Businesses use identity systems to help run businesses efficiently and in accordance with policies and regulatory mandates. To date, the IdM market is almost exclusively a software market, with very few businesses operating identification services for profit. Is there a business model for identity? In this topic, attendees will learn about important new developments that move IdM past a strict command/control model, including:

• Understanding the Identity Oracle as a business model for identity
• How OpenID, user-centric identity, information cards, and Higgins are changing the nature of the IdM market
• How identity protocols need to evolve in order to create decentralized, social-style architecture for identity
• Why personas are critical to social identity and how they should be implemented

Authentication

The need to authenticate users across domain contexts is reaching a boiling point. Governments need to authenticate citizens, businesses need to recognize partners’ employees, and banks need to authenticate legitimate customers. Solutions are everywhere, but each solution is effective only for a limited number of use cases. The industry desperately needs a workable, scalable approach to distributed authentication. Is it possible to build a global authentication standard, or is every attempt doomed to become nothing more than another tactical authentication technology?

In this topic, attendees will:

• Hear recommendations from Burton Group analysts on which authentication technologies and methodologies to deploy
• Hear industry leaders discuss next-generation authentication architecture
• Discuss a workable model for wide-scale, secure federated authentication
• Learn how to enable interoperability across authentication solutions through security token services (STSs) and other means

The Infrastructure Services Model: Focus on Identity Services

The IT industry needs to fulfill the promise of reusable infrastructure services based on applying the principles of SOA and leveraging open standards. Burton Group extends its ISM vision and challenges identity infrastructure vendors to cooperate in building out solutions that interoperate and can be leveraged by enterprise customer SOA-based applications.

Specific areas to be covered include:

• The business value of the Infrastructure Services Model
• Remapping identity infrastructure into services
• Early customer experiences with identity services
• How a policy decision service works and why it’s important
• Industry standards and why more work is needed
• Industry panel on the path to identity services, interoperability challenges, and how to catalyze the industry to get the work done

Policy and Privilege Management: The Witches Brew of Compliance

A growing list of IdM tools stake claim to solving the compliance challenge for enterprises, leaving us with the question: how many tools does it take to accomplish the task? Products range from user provisioning to automate account administration, role management for abstracting users and privileges, enterprise applications control management to address intricate policy rules in applications, entitlement management to externalize policy decisions for fine-grained authorizations from applications, and identity audit tools to validate and certify the environment. Is all of this necessary? Are there opportunities to converge technologies?

This session will look at the solutions available in this market and push for greater integration, better interoperability, and more convenient packaging. Issues discussed include:

• What improvements can make provisioning systems easier to deploy and integrate with the policy management infrastructure?
• Role management tools are improving, but how can enterprises conduct successful role definition projects?
• How can all the policy and privilege management tools be integrated into a holistic solution?
• When will COTS applications externalize security and identity management?