Matt Flynn's Identity Management Blog: Surviving an Identity Audit

Check out Matt Flynn's Identity Management Blog: Surviving an Identity Audit and Matt's associated white paper on this topic. Good reading. There's not enough info on how identity and identity audits in particular map to compliance - despite the fact that compliance is a big driver/stick for getting your identity house in order. (You need to overlook the commercial reference at the end of Matt's whitepaper. Unfortunately, we sometimes have to support our employer in our writings.)

Identity audit solutions reduce organizational risk by providing reports and monitoring of the identity systems which grant or deny system access and the user accounts empowered to act within the environment. Having effective audit and monitoring in place also has the additional benefit of acting as a deterrent for system users who might otherwise attempt to subvert policy.

While flipping through the channels tonight I happened across an old favorite - "The Exorcist". I was reminded of that famous line "The Power of Christ" while I read Matt's whitepaper where he talks about the "Power of Identity". Unfortunately, it was the Catholic priests at my school that forbade us to see The Exorcist that made us run out to see it immediately (of course).

Matt, maybe you should forbid people from reading your whitepaper? Nice work.

See you at the Gartner conference?


Technorati Tags:
identity management, compliance

Archive the box!

If you liked the Quest Idol video that I posted about in February then you'll like our "Archive the box" video that the same group of guys here at Quest put together...It's all about our Exchange archive manager product.




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Quest Software, Exchange, Microsoft

Identity and the "50 greatest arguments"

Network World recently published this interesting story:

Perhaps the only thing more fun than working on and playing with network technologies is arguing about them. Macs vs. PCs. Ethernet vs. Token Ring. Outsourcing vs. keeping it in-house. Here's our take on the nastiest, most colorful and in some cases, still unresolved network industry arguments. Read up and weigh in.

Yes, a few of their top 50 "arguments" are identity related! Here they are:

X.500 vs. LDAP - Directory services battle took turn with advent of Internet

This architectural argument would pack networking conference sessions, divide the room and ignite heated shouting matches in the early-to-mid-1990s. It was a case of the student overtaking the mentor as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol was at first a simple alternative to X.500’s Directory Access Protocol (DAP). LDAP was used for accessing X.500 directories via the TCP/IP protocol. With the advent of the Internet and its reliance on TCP/IP, X.500 faded into the background even though it was later modified for use over TCP/IP.

Flashback: I'm at the DISA conference on the Defense Message System (DMS) in Resto, VA circa 1995. I'm talking to the DMS Project Manager - a distant relation of my wife - and tell him that DMS is doomed to failure if it continues to ignore TCP/IP and LDAP over OSI and X.500. He tells me that I'm crazy. Who's crazy now, Wayne?! See the associated argument about SNA and OSI versus TCP/IP in the same list!

Industry standards vs. proprietary technologies

It’s hard to imagine now, but there used to be a rigorous debate about which strategy was best for corporate IT buyers: industry standards or proprietary technology. Standards have won this debate, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t advantages to buying proprietary technology.

Oh, really? Standards have won the debate? Do we have to go back to that argument I recently had about MIT Kerberos and Windows Kerberos? Will the real standard please stand up - you know, the one that is used by more people. After all, isn't it usage that defines success and standards versus "Should", "Must" and "Optional" statements in a piece of paper emitted from the IETF or United Nations?

Let's not even go back to the discussion of X.400 (an ISO standard) versus SMTP (an IETF standard). Why didn't they both win? They are both standards?

P.S. to Network World (John, you missed this one): How come you didn't mention X.400 vs. SMTP? That was a good argument while it lasted buddy!

Technorati Tags:
identity management, X.500, X.400, SMTP, Kerberos

Quest acquires eXc Software

Not much fanfare about this acquisition on our end but if you go to http://www.excsoftware.com/ you'll see our logo on eXc's home page. I'm excited about this for a few reasons...

• Agentless connectivity to non-Windows systems - lots of applications in Quest for this set of products
• Single sign-on with mainframes - what else can I say here, I'm interested!

As with any acquisition we're figuring out how and where to specifically integrate eXc's bits but in the meantime the eXc team will continue doing business as usual except with a much larger team backing them up!

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Quest Software, eXc Software