Role Up-Role Up

Without doubt a very subjective question. Firstly looking at the Access and Identity Management space it’s hard to see any major gaps where new innovations will easily bolt in. My thoughts are there will great deal of consolidation and tidying up to do, ensuring products are more cohesively bolted together and ensuring they become easier to deploy and manage.

The one gap I do see that customers are starting to ask for is Dynamic Segregation of Duties, in principle this should be pretty easy to achieve, but the reality is far more complex. As a starting point any product that offers DSD must be state aware, that is to say it must know where a user is and where a user has been in respect to their IT journey across the enterprise. This is not difficult to achieve in web based access control technologies but will be a bigger challenge across non web based apps. It’s a fascinating area and we may see some of the SSO products such as Imprivata and Passlogix as well as those relying on Kerberos to take a lead in this area.

Compliance is the next area, I know this is pretty old hat, it’s not the technologies that will change here but the customers, particularly across EMEA. The transparency directive becomes effective in June this year, this basically means that any European organisations that may be of public interest must show transparency in its procedures, the easiest way to measure this is via a compliance framework. The big organisations already (to the most part) have a compliance strategy in place. SME’s will start to take a bigger interest in this area but will not have the means or appetite for a full on IAM suite. IMHO SME’s will look to the smaller, specialist independent vendors to meet their compliance needs.

The last thing for 2008 is the whole social networking scene, personally I use Linkedin and think it’s very useful. For some folk one social network is not enough, it seems on a daily basis I am getting requests from all kinds of social networks such as, Facebook, Plaxo, Konnects etc, etc. I am sure these are good things, but can they all survive in a highly competitive space.

2007 was a fast and furious year, I am sure 2008 will be bigger and better. 

After a horrendous wait I finally got my CISSP results from (ISC)2 and have fortunately passed the CISSP exam. It is by far the strangest exam I think I have ever taken, 6 hours to complete 250 very fluffy multi choice questions. There is a lot to the exam at a conceptual level, at least. As folks say it is a mile long and an inch thick. Success story for me, but the annoying thing was the delay in receiving my results. The delay was due to systems upgrades at (ISC)2, this upgrade appeared to disrupt all normal operations and created huge delays. These things happen but we are not talking hours or days we are talking weeks. the funny side of this (in a perverse way) is that (ISC)2 are very big on Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery (DR), ensuring things run to plan and enabling an organisation to get back up and running as quickly as possible in order to sustain its self. The theory is great but I am not sure how well (ISC)2 heed their own teachings in practise.

It was a good exercise in patience and in my opinion worth the wait, the plan is now to move on and try for CISM, keeps the old grey matter ticking over if nothing else!!!

After a few months of the EMEA office being in full swing, the marketing machine has come in to force an announced our presence. This article seems to be pretty much everywhere, but for those that may have missed it, you can read it here. The opening of the office is a significant step forward and demonstrates Vaau’s commitments to the ever growing EMEA market by being the first Enterprise Roles Management organisation, to open a base office in the UK from which to service European customers.

Slightly off topic, but something that has been an issue this week. Being relatively new to the whole flying around Europe scene, I have been bitten twice in 5 days. The first was on a flight into Frankfurt, I booked the flight from Stansted to Frankfurt to be fair it was cheap. I now fully understand why it was so cheap, Frankfurt Hahn airport is a meer 1 and a half hours outside Frankfurt. The second was on a flight from Stansted to Dusseldorf Wesser, this is slightly better but it is still an hour and 15 outside of Dusseldorf. It begs the question are all Ryan air flights really value for money, not in all cases, when a taxi to get to where you want to go costs over €100. Note to self, look at a map before booking a flight.

It seems like ages since I lasted posted, it’s been a manic few weeks, with University assignments to get completed, the family Christmas thing and just general madness of the New Year. As well as all this, I have taken up a new post at Vaau, I would like to reach out and say a big thanks to all those well wishers, particularly Paul Toal for the “big up” on his congratulations post.

I am sure you will start seeing a lot more posts as I slowly but surely get my head around Enterprise Roles Management (ERM) arena. ERM seems like a really bad choice of categories to pigeon hole the Vaau technology into, that title barely scratches the surface of the capabilities of the software.

Anyway that’s for future posts, this years resolution is to post at least twice a week. With my new found knowledge that should be pretty painless, so this is one for this week!

So, here goes my first steps in to the world of blogging. The intention is to start slow and build up.