Harcey's Identity: Derrick Harcey's Weblog

It's the beginning of a new year. I am not usually one to make new years resolutions, but here are a few items which I expect to be hot topics related to Identity Management, or at least things I expect to spend a lot time on:

• Compliance and Auditing - well, yes, I'm starting with the easy and most obvious one. This is, of course not new, but I think people will start becoming ready to take full advantage of solutions like Sun's Identity Manager to address compliance requirements. This includes Periodic Access Review as well as proactive audit compliance policy scanning and continuous compliance during provisioning. While these features have been in our product for some time now, the customers I talk to are considering not only basic minimal identity auditing requirements, but also more advanced topics like these and how they can reduce the manual effort required to meet their compliance requirements.
• Federation - It's not a secret that the US is not leading the world in the adoption of federation deployments. However, the signs seem to be pointing to the time being right for federation deployments taking off this year. This With SAML, Liberty, (and WS Federation) all in various stages of adoption and maturity, there are more choices and solutions to meet customers requirements.
• Identity Integration - This is kind of a catch all category for what I have spent a lot of time doing in the last few years and expect to take to a higher level this year. This includes:
  • Integration of the user experience around Provisioning and Access Management (merging the realtime access management and administrative provisioning services into a seamless solution)
  • Web Services integration with provisioning (using SPML), and integration of identity provisioning solutions with composite applications and SOA's
  • Better standards based protection of web services - This includes Liberty enabled web services as well as Securing Web Services Using the SAML