Identity Management Maturity Model

The Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance Journal published my piece on a maturity mdoel for identity management. You can read the full article here.

Achieving Compliance Through Identity Maturity
2006-10-27 12:00:00.0 CDT

Where do you want to be and how do you get there?

By Anshu Sharma

Security and identity management have become an important issue on the radar of CFO’s and CIO’s as wave after wave of regulations in the areas of financial controls, privacy protection, and identity theft prevention are adopted in various countries. US companies will spend upwards of $15 billion on technology products and professional services this year alone in order to adhere to new compliance regulations, according to AMR Research, Boston.

The initial response by organizations to these regulations has been to adopt a piecemeal approach but a duct-tape approach to fixing every possible identity and security loophole results in high expenditure without a sense of how close the business is getting to its end goal. The end goal is to be a secure, well-managed organization with optimized processes for employee on-boarding and off-boarding, and efficient controls that prevent fraud and detect problems in a timely manner. The path to this goal traverses through various levels of maturity.

...read full article

Oracle OpenWorld by kumasawa (Creative Commons license)

Nishan Kaushik who is an identity management guru and architect for the Oracle Identity Management products has written some excellent pieces on provisioning and role management at Talking Identity Blog.

Oracle OpenWorld is here to dominate San Francisco

Did I say dominate San Francisco? I meant Software!


Yes, Oracle is taking over San Francisco for the next week with its annual gala that has grown to over 40,000 attendees this year. I will be attending as a member of the Oracle Identity Management team- we have a signficant presence with demo booths and over 10 sessions. I will be presenting on "Managing Security in the World of Web2.0 and SOA". The aim of my presentation is to bring out the key common themes between Web2.0 and SOA, and at then address some of the common security concerns around web services. Another key enabling technology for Web2.0 and SOA is Federation that allows businesses and consumers to collaborate across organizational and network boundaries. I will also touch upon what is Enterprise2.0 and how do you apply mashups to enterprise services.

The event this year will include a much larger audience interested in applications with Siebel (Oracle|Siebel) and Peoplesoft (Oracle|Peoplesoft) having joined the ranks over the last 2 years. Fusion Middleware and Fusion Applications with emphasis on standards-based open architecture of SOA will be one of the key focus areas.

And yes, Sir Elton John will be performing. This should be fun. If you are attending, you should visit our Identity Management booth and say hello. And if you are not, visit the website to read material and watch the webcasts. And yes, Larry Ellison will be giving a keynote in addition to technology development leaders Chuck Rozwat and Thomas Kurian (his debut keynote at OpenWorld), and applications head John Wookey.

CNET's News.com has some nice pictures.