Friday, November 12, 2010

Gartner Identity & Access Management Summit 2010 - See you there?

Quest Software will be attending, exhibiting and speaking at the Gartner IAM Summit in San Diego next week (Nov 15-17). I'll be there along with many of my fellow IAM colleagues.

A few of the sessions I am especially interested in:

  • The Future of Information Security is Context- and Identity-aware (Neil MacDonald)
  • Transforming IAM: The New Business Intelligence Connection (Bill Hostmann)
  • Economics of Identity Management (Bob Blakeley)
  • IAM Intelligence and Analytics (Earl Perkins and Mark Nicolett)
  • Identity Assurance (Bob Blakeley)
  • Managing Identity in the Cloud (Gregg Kreizman)

I hope to see you at a session or at our hospitality booth!

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Friday, November 05, 2010

Q&A: IAM and the Unix/Linux Organization

There’s an article in Enterprise Systems with this title that I wanted to draw your attention to. The author, James Powell, spent some time talking to me about this topic and you can find my answers to his questions in his article. Basically, the article discusses how Unix/Linux systems needn't be islands of identity; the challenges and options for addressing authentication, provisioning, and security and we take a closer look at Active Directory bridge products.

Some of the questions we discussed include:
  • What are some of the unique challenges Unix/Linux organizations face with identity and management (IAM)?
  • What are the options to address those challenges?
  • Can you explain the idea behind Active Directory bridge products? What are the benefits and drawbacks of such products?
  • What makes these AD bridge solutions different from the native tools available through OS providers and open source options?
  • With such a fundamental shift in IAM strategy with an AD bridge solution, what are some of the things organizations should look out for?
  • How is this different from more “traditional” solutions (such as a metadirectory and synchronization)?
  • Can you give some examples of where and how AD bridge technologies are used in the real world?
  • What does Quest offer for Unix/Linux IAM?
So if you’re interested in any of these questions I’d invite you to take a closer look at James’ article.

Tuesday, November 02, 2010

Quest Authentication Services wins 2010 Redmond Magazine Readers Choice Award

In the “Best Interoperability Product” category we were awarded Preferred Product status. We were also the only Active Directory (AD) bridge product to make the list at all. You can read all about it at their website.
What I do like about Redmond Magazine and the readers choice award is it really is the readers choice:
Redmond sent its Readers Choice survey to 40,000 subscribers of the magazine, each of whom could only fill out the survey once. Vendors are not allowed to vote. This year, we're again awarding "ISV Winner" status to non-Microsoft, independent vendor entries that didn't win their categories outright but managed to beat everybody else but Microsoft.
This is one more proof point that Quest Authentication Services 4.0 is hitting the mark with new, leading features like:

Detailed Auditing and Alerting: Consolidating Unix data into Active Directory is just part of the picture. Authentication Services 4.0 solves the challenge of how to audit, report and alert on who makes changes to critical Unix data that is now stored in Active Directory. Version 4.0 includes award winning functionality to deliver full visibility and change alerting into who made changes, to what, when, where, and even why.

Web-based Administrative Console: Effective management is essential when integrating Unix with Active Directory. The new web-based administration console dramatically simplifies deployment, expands management to local Unix users and groups, provides granular reports on key data and attributes, and streamlines the overall management of the Active Directory Bridge product.

One-time Password Authentication: Easily add another layer of security in situations that require it. For example when deploying Unix systems to tightly controlled network environments (E.G. a DMZ). With new functionality included in Authentication Services 4.0, Active Directory users can be required to authenticate with a One Time Password to Unix systems. Everything that is required for an out-of-the-box solution comes with 4.0 including hardware and Software tokens, PAM modules, Group Policy management capabilities and end-user licenses.

Freeware Administrative Console: The administrative console is available free-of-charge to any organization wishing to take advantage of its local Unix user and group management capabilities.

Advanced Management: Support for the flexible scripting of PowerShell, additional ADUC integration, and automated configuration tools.

Group Policy: Patented Group Policy functionality expands to include macro support, which enables a single GPO to be re-used across multiple Unix systems. In addition Mac OS X Group Policy support keeps pace with the latest OS from Apple (OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard).

Privileged Account Management: Authentication Services 4.0 includes optimized integration with Quest Privilege Manager for Unix. Solve Unix security initiatives that need to control which users can access which system and what elevated rights they have. For example use Active Directory group memberships and Group Policy for streamlined management tasks.

Wait until you see what we have coming in 2011 – more awesomeness is on the way!

Monday, November 01, 2010

Microsoft to add Java support to Azure

I caught this post over at Mary-Jo Foley’s “All about Microsoft” blog. This doesn't surprise me. In fact, it would surprise me more if they decided they wouldn’t support Java in Azure. They already support a bunch of other non-.NET languages so why not Java? Might there be identity data that needs to be accessed from Java? Might their be identities to authenticate or authorize from Java? The real interesting part for me is if they start supporting Java in Azure will they do that in other areas, too? Like federation, for example. Microsoft needs to be as open as they can be and this is one small step in that direction but there’s a lot of other steps still to be taken.
This Microsoft has been touting for a while the ability for developers to use a variety of tools, like Java, PHP, Ruby and Eclipse, when developing applications for Windows Azure. But the company is going to step up its Java support for Azure in the coming weeks and months, elevating Java to a “first-class citizen” in the Microsoft cloud realm.
The reasons Microsoft is interested in doing this aren’t hard to figure. There are lots of Java developers out there whom Microsoft would be excluding from its potential cloud customer base if it didn’t support anything beyond .Net. And Microsoft cloud competitors like VMware, Amazon and Google all have built Java support into their respective platforms.