Day Two at the Catalyst Conference also provided a wealth of insight from a
number of interesting speakers. Several of the sessions today had more depth
than the ones we heard yesterday.

Mike
Neuenschwander,
Associate Research Director, Burton Group – Episode
III, Identity Management Markets and Architecture: Evolution and Innovation

• Identity management is the set of business processes, and a supporting infrastructure,
  for the creation, maintenance, and use of digital identities in online spaces
• “Relation” is a core ingredient to distributed systems. Identity
  isn’t about the end points—it’s about the relationship
• "Identarati" – those involved with Identity
• Cross-domain sign-on is a big winner this year.
• Service-oriented architecture (SOA) a better approach than suites

Nick
Nikols, Analyst, Burton Group – Identity Services and the Identity
Access Layer

• Growing IdM requirements are straining current capabilities, requiring multiple
  and dynamic views of identity information and more complex relationships between
  identities and other objects
• Distributed identity services becomes the new goal
• Identity services are the set of services that enable applications and other
  services to fully leverage identity information

Ken Weiss, Charles Schwab & Co., Using Web Services
to Manage Identity and Access

• The perimeter has vanished
• Every resource, every application, must be identity-enabled
• No substitute for a consistently applied opaque unique identifier
• Really, really know your requirements
• Policies define how Identities are permitted to access resources

Doug
Simmons, Principal Consultant, Burton Group – Provisioning
Implementation: Setting Realistic Expectations

• Deployment strategy will be influenced as much by regulatory issues as return-on-investment
  priorities
• Help end users become productive immediately. Focus on Day 1 productivity.
• Establish a three-year architecture. Implement in bite-sized chunks.

Gerry
Gebel, Senior Analyst, Burton Group – The Big Challenge: Standardizing
Policy While Maintaining Semantic Intent

• Focusing on policy for security enforcement in IdM systems, including authorization,
  privacy enforcement, and personalization
• Momentum is growing for the adoption of XACML among broad vendor base
• WSPolicy framework is maturing slowly, but is starting to appear in products
• "Entitlement engine" products are emerging to manage policy

Dan
Blum, Senior VP, Group Research Director, Burton Group – Federation
in the Identity Infrastructure

• Federated identity management solves real problems today, enables Web services,
  and constitutes the future of the identity management market
• Business interoperability issues are lagging technology interoperability
• On the standards front, Liberty/SAML is making most progress now, but Microsoft
  and IBM (WS*) are slowly progressing. Beware of the tortoise overtaking the
  hare.

Dave Temoshok, Director, Identity Policy and Management GSA
Office of Governmentwide Policy – Government Adoption of Federated Identity

• The Government needs the capability to authenticate millions of citizens,
  businesses, and governmental entities without issuing a standard, national
  ID
• GSA is directed to provide common authentication infrastructure for all
  Federal E-Gov business applications and E-access control.
• IDM Federation Core Infrastructure addresses Trust, Interoperable Technology
  and Business Relationships/Governance
• If there is to be no central registry of personal information, attributes,
  or authorization privileges – a decentralized approach means federation.

Jamie
Lewis, CEO, Burton Group – User-Centrism Meets Polycentrism:
Creating Identity Infrastructure for the Internet

• The Internet lacks sufficient identity, security infrastructure
• Customer awareness of privacy, identity is rising
• "Its the relationships, stupid." ID services facilitate, coordinate
  relationships, interaction
• Identity systems that work for a financial services company will not work
  for social software and vice versa
• Ultimately, systems will mesh, creating a fabric that will allow systems
  user-centric, enterprise, government systems to interact using common standards

John Shewchuk, CTO Distributed Systems, Microsoft, Microsoft’s
Digital Identity Strategy

• Users should be in control.
• Each user should make decisions about relationships he or she has.
• Kim Cameron’s 7 Laws of Identity provide a set of axioms to describe how
  Identity systems should work
• InfoCard is Microsoft’s proposal for an Identity infrastructure that complies
  with the 7 Laws to replace the ill-fated Passport
• WS* is a comprehensive framework of "Identity standards" to enable
  web services.

Dick Hardt, CEO, Sxip
– Identity 2.0

• The Identity industry is currently at version 1.0, requiring centralized
  Identity Management.
• Federated Identity will be provide Identity version 1.5
• User Centric Identity, properly implemented, will be Identity 2.0.
• Trusted third parties are required to validate Identities

Bob Blakley, Chief Scientist, Security and Privacy, IBM, The
Logic of Identity

• Identity and privacy are not technical problems
• Security and Privacy are naturally at odds with each other

Roundtable Discussion: User-Centric Identity Management:
Federating the Individual? (Participants — Stefan
Brands, President, Credentica; Kim
Cameron, Identity Architect, Microsoft; Paul Trevithick,
Co-Founder, SocialPhysics.org.;

Bob Blakley, Chief Scientist, Security and Privacy,
IBM; moderated, sort of, by Jamie
Lewis, CEO, Burton Group.)

• I was disappointed in this roundtable discussion. What could have been an
  enlightening discussion about the real life issues facing user-centric identity
  was little more than a very high level conversation of esoteric issues that
  may apply in the distant future. I was able to get more insight into the real
  issues facing user-centric identity management by spending 5 minutes with
  Dick Hart in the Sxip hospitality suite than by listening to 30 minutes of
  this group.

Note: A computer malfunction that occured during the
conference prevented me from posting this blog entry until Tuesday, July 19th.

Tag: Identity