Identity breach at First Tech. Again!!

Everyone one of our bills is paid by our First Tech Visa card - except for our local and federal taxes. Does First Tech - or any other provider - understand the cost to me to change all of our billing from one credit card to another? This is truly ridiculous.

How many times will First Tech re-issue cards and at what expense before they figure out they need to do something different? What is the cost of this to the industry and humanity as a whole?

Oh, yah, and First Tech is the bank that Microsoft recommends to new employees. Maybe they have some other recommendations for First Tech - like CardSpace (or Credentica?).

Bozos.

Technorati Tags:
identity management, First Tech Credit Union, security

May the force be with you?

Let me state that this is great. I'm glad to see Microsoft is re-examining it's support of standards. Check out John Fontana's coverage of this here and here.

Here's Joe Long's quote...

Joe Long, general manager of the connected identity and directory at Microsoft, said during a panel discussion at NetPro's Directory Experts Conference that Microsoft was being forced to re-examine if it would support SAML, the Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) and the Extensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML).

Microsoft has introduced an interoperability promise and we are trying to understand the ramifications of that," Long said. "Hopefully we can make a commitment one way or the other in the next few months."

I guess I'm disappointed it occurs late in the game. I really felt that the acquisition of Zoomit and their metadirectory product in 1999 would be the start of an interoperability wave but it appears it might be the EU that's forcing the issue.

Better late than never, eh?

Technorati Tags:
identity management, Microsoft

You won't have me to kick around anymore!

No, not me. Hewlett-Packard!

I heard about a month ago that HP was going to bow out of the IDM business. I didn't want to post anything because I felt it would compromise the person that told me. But, now that it has made the news:

Check out Burton Group's blog entry on this very topic...

Burton Group has been contacted by HP customers who report that HP is no longer going to seek new customers for its Identity Center product. We have contacted HP and the company confirms that HP Software has decided to focus its investment in identity management products exclusively on existing customers and not on pursuing additional customers or market share. HP is in the process of reaching out to each customer regarding the change.

Seriously - you thought HP was a contender in this space???!!! No, no, Nanette. Thanks for playing. Mission failure.

My friend Ian Yip also discusses HP over at his blog...

They've never really been in the Enterprise Identity Management game.

Let's be honest. The meta-directory is dead. Approaches that look like a meta-directory are dead. We talk about Identity 2.0 in the context of Web services and the evolution of digital identity but our infrastructure, enterprise identity "stuff" is decrepit and falling apart. I have visions of identity leprosy with this bit and that bit simply falling off because it was never built with Web services in mind.

I started in this area in 1993 and some of the same architectures are still out there.

There is going to be a big bang in this area. HP getting sucked into the black hole is just a step towards that...

p.s. I wonder if you can still buy "LDSU" from HP? That was Compaq's holdover from the early 1990's. Wouldn't that be funny if you could. Now there's some leprosy...

Technorati Tags:
identity management

National Security Trumps Personal Privacy

Today we announced the results of our Identity Management Government Survey of federal, state, local and municipal government IT professionals conducted by Pursuant, a Washington, D.C.-based public opinion research firm. They surveyed nearly 500 customers so it's a pretty good sample.

Key findings include:

• The heterogeneous (mixed-application) environment is “very challenging” or “somewhat challenging” according to 51% for their organization or agency’s identity management system.


• According to a majority (53%) of respondents, national security should be the priority, even if Americans’ personal privacy is negatively impacted.


• Respondents cited lack of funding as the main obstacle that would most impact their organization or agency’s ability to reach their identity management objectives (31%). During the next five years, many (45%) think the amount budgeted for identity management projects and services will increase; very few (5%) think it will decrease.


• However, half of respondents (50%) believe Congress should provide more funding to agencies to develop and implement identity management systems; a nearly equal number (49%) believe it should require greater planning and collaboration among federal agencies and state and local governments.


• More city, county and municipal government IT professionals are likely to be “very concerned” (59%) about compromised critical public infrastructure than federal (45%) or state (38%) government IT professionals.


• Over one-half of government IT professionals (56%) have either personally seen or heard about someone violating their organization or agency’s security protocols.

The majority of folks surveyed believe national security trumps security but I guess with the current administration why is this surprising?! Also, the fact that over half have seen or heard about security violations is also interesting.

What does everyone think about the privacy part of this?

Technorati Tags:
Quest Software, identity management, privacy