Welcome to the launch of my blog on blogs.sun.com. This is my first ever post on here, I am the proud owner of the 'infosec' blog at Sun. I would like to explore a little bit on 'digital identity' in my own words here, So lets start with basics....
What is an Identity?:
Simple words its “YOU” on The Internet, on Your Computer, on Your Company Network, on All Your Favourite Shopping websites, on Your Internet Banking account, on Your Blog Account, on Your Online Social Network.
What is the problem?:
Another simple thought on this widely discussed issue, how many people are connected to Internet these days? How many people have mobile handsets these days? How many people join forums, blogs, discussion groups, social network each day? How many people use internet banking? How many people sign-up on new websites everyday? How many people come online to Chat with friends and family everyday? How many people in this world have E-mail addresses?
Answer to all these can be different respectively but the common answer could be billions…!!!! And specially in the
near future this figure is going to grow rapidly as more and more people are getting connected using one of those means.
Remember Sun Vision: “The Network is the Computer“, all this makes this sentence more and more true
day-after-day.
What are the Challenges?:
Where is the infrastructure to manage all those digital identities connecting with each other everyday? Who is doing what to meet those Challenges? What steps are being taken by big organizations? Who are the key players in Identity Space? Why security is everything? Where is the real transformation happening in this world? Who else is adopting Identity management? Why all of a sudden everyone’s talking about IdM?
Identity management has been around since few years now, but adoption has been slower than it should have been. Remember the evolution of antivirus on to the corporate network. It was a hot cake before few years and still is, but it happened only when corporates realized the true value of keeping viruses out of their company network. Its the same with Identity Management, more and more corporates are facing the question of 'who has and done what,when,where,how,why' on the network/system? I agree its been a slow adoption but 2008 will be the year for IdM. Also its amazing the way the software mergers are taking place these days, every big software giant is after small futuristic software startups. Look at Oracle, IBM, Sun Microsystems, CA today and their software offering, compare that with few years back software offerings. Amazing thing that I notice is more focus on Security, Identity, Access Management, Access Control, Compliance etc.
The identity market is hotting up day-by-day, big organizations wants more automations around user provisioning, user
on boarding process, change user access requirements, disable unwanted accounts, protect privacy, user self service, password administration, one-point-of-contact and all this while being compliant with certain government regulations. Sun is the market leader in most of these focus areas at the moment.
Reference: http://photos.windley.com/albums/iiw2007a/DSC_0018.jpg, please visit IIW
Identity Management Resources (Sun):
