Commentary by Mark Wahl, CISA
Bob Blakley on outsourcing to the identity oracle (20071122)
Bob Blakley of the Burton Group was recently interviewed by Forum One Communications on "User-centric identity: Platforms, trade-offs, and next steps".
He was asked how the Identity Oracle approach might succeed where previous attempts to operate outsourced identity providers (Tidepoint?) have not been successful:
Compliance mandates create financial risk for organizations which collect identity data but don't protect it. This means that there is now - for the first time really - a business cost to the collection and use of identity information. The core notion behind the Identity Oracle is that the [Identity] Oracle can be a business which specializes in handling identity information, and because it specializes it can do a better job than its customers, and because it does a better job it can do the job at a lower cost, and because it can do the job at a lower cost, it can charge its customers less than they would pay to do the job in-house and still make a profit.