Commentary by Mark Wahl, CISA
Organizing principles for identity systems:
Digital ID World keynote by Jamie Lewis (20070925)
Jamie Lewis of the Burton Group provided the second day keynote at the DIDW conference (DIDW2007). Some of the observations included that
The starting point for an enterprise beginning an identity management deployment is still the same, as most products require a directory infrastructure, and
data linking and cleansing is relevant to any IdM project
.In the provisioning space, there's no product that provides data synchronization and workflow equally well, and provisioning deployed primarily for compliance won't necessarily provide an enterprise account management function.
Identity-as-a-service within the organization has a few deployments, but is inhibited by governance issues and lack of mandate.
The applicability of federation has been overstated in the market, as
ubiquity is preposterous with today's technologies
, due to these technologies' requirements for tight cross-party coordination hindering scale, and their trust issues.Claims (in theory) could help with deployment, as they could allow authoritative sources to emerge, but coordination and trust problems remain.
Emerging authentication technology is still being designed and positioned for tech-saavy users, and the user experience might not be appropriate for the typical web users, as he illustrated with the Doctor Fun cartoon.
