Identity Management

Wanted: Up and coming Cyber Security Professionals

Cyber Security – Identity Management Implementer

Secure your identities against the dangers of the Cyber World, automate the repetitive, and empower your users!

Let’s

  1. Shut the front door on the most obvious  vector for Cyber-attacks
  2. Reduce the IT department’s compliance burden (SOX, HIPAA, FERPA, GLBA, ISO etc).
  3. Free IT people to do tasks that require more brain power

By

  1. Automating the drone-like work of managing user identities

  2. Disabling accounts of terminated users

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Missing the old Directory Experts Conference? Try HIP!

On Monday, Nov 5th, and Tuesday the 6th I will be attending and speaking at the Hybrid Identity Protection (HIP) Conference in NYC. On Monday at 4 PM I will be giving an updated version of Top Lessons Learned from Disasters in Identity Management as well as a sneak peek of my new book, How to be an MVP in Life.

I am very excited to attend this conference. Thanks to Darren Mar-Elia and Micky Bresman at Semperis for putting it all together. This should be a lot like the old DEC – Directory Experts Conference since it looks like DEC co-founder Gil Kirkpatrick is heavily involved.

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European Identity Conference 2018 - Wednesday

Jet lag and other issues caught up with me the next day (Tuesday) and I didn’t attend any sessions :(

One thing I love is that most presentations including keynotes are only 20 min long so even when we get a terrible one – we know it will be over soon. But most of the sessions were good and some were great!

My first Wednesday session was listening to Sebastian Goodrick of SUVA and Dr. Jacek Jonczy discussing how agile methodologies did and didn’t work well with replacing their existing Identity Management system with another one. Hire an agile coach! Recognize that replacing an existing system is often big bang and so you won’t really be pushing out to production, but you can still do sprints.

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Top 10 Lessons from Disasters in Identity Management

I will speak at Kuppinger Cole’s European Identity Conference on Top 10 Lessons from Disasters in Identity Management in May in Munich.

With great automation capability comes great responsibility! Come discuss and learn vital lessons gleaned from disasters in Identity Management.

So if you would like your disaster story to be considered for inclusion let me know. I would love to add to the stories.

This will be a fun interactive session.

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Identiverse, Cloud Identity Summit

Last summer I attended and spoke at the Cloud Identity Summit in Chicago. First big news: it was renamed to Identiverse and 2018 will be in Boston. As a consultant I have limited time to attend conferences and speak. So conferences have to be great. I do love this one, but in the interest of time, I will be skipping it this year in favor of speaking at the European Identity Conference in May 2018 in Munich, Germany.

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Is MIM dead? Not yet!

From time to time I hear people wonder if MIM is dead.

Why do people ask?

  • They don’t feel like they have heard a good road map recently
  • They aren’t seeing the improvements they hoped for
  • They aren’t paying attention to the actions of the product group

Why do I say it isn’t dead yet?

  • While the Cloud Identity is the future, we are and will be in hybrid identity for a long time and MIM is Microsoft’s key component to that.

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Check your inputs -- Save your job!

At various times in my 10 years of Identity Management Consulting and 25 years working in the IT industry I have been asked to clean up various messes generated by those before me. Some of those messes involved disk failure or other issues that couldn’t be completely prevented. But some involved automated process that didn’t check their inputs.

 If garbage into a computer gives you garbage out, then garbage into an automated process that doesn’t check its inputs gives you a meltdown! Even Disney’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice Fantasia illustrates what can go wrong with an automated process.

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Big Data needs Identity in order to Act

At the 2015 Identity Summit Scott McNeely declared “Big data without Identity is not actionable

Let’s discuss.

Pulling from Information Week and IBM the Top 6 use cases of Big Data are:
1. Big Data Exploration
2. 360 degree view of customer
3. Information Security and Intelligence
4. Operation Analysis of data from Internet of Things
5. Data warehouse Augmentation/Optimization
6. Big Data Efficiency play (break down silos)

Big Data use case

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Movie Review of Home -- or how IDM could have saved the day.

Over the weekend I took one of my children to see the new animated film  Home starring Jim Parsons, Rihanna, Steve Martin and Jennifer Lopez. A group of technically superior but very cowardly aliens, called the Boov flee from their implacable enemy, the Gorgs, and decide to take over Earth, relocating all of the primitive natives (us) to Australia. Aside from the political commentary of the entire human race being placed in a reservation, the thing that most struck me was how one of the near disasters could have been averted through solid Identity Management Systems. A hapless and lonely Boov, named “Oh” invited his new neighbors to a “warming of house party.” When no one showed, he sought out other acquaintances to invite and sent out an Evite ™ but he accidently did a Send All, which somehow included their implacable enemy. Great hilarity ensues as the evite will take 40 hrs to reach their enemy.

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