Provisioning is important to keep access under control, as well as Access Governance solutions play a vital role in that game. However, there is a third group of applications which is commonly required: Tools which allow to dive into the details of access controls in specific environments. There are SAP specific solutions and tools for mainframe environments, XACML for standardized entitlement management for custom applications might be counted as well – and there are tools for the world of less structured information, like file servers, Microsoft SharePoint, and others.

These tools are important to enable a detailed analysis of access rights at the level of files, folders, and shares – when looking at file servers. Provisioning helps us to ensure that a user has an Active Directory account and is member of some specific groups. But what are these groups allowed to do – in detail? Some Access Governance solutions might provide some details, but typically not as specific as the expert tools in that area can do. And there are many tools out there. These days I spoke with Protected Networks, but Econet, Tesis, and ASB - to mention just some German vendors – can deliver on this as well, with somewhat different approaches and capabilities. And these are just some examples.

From my perspective, we need a layered approach – Enterprise GRC, Access Governance, Provisioning, and the specific tools for different important application environments. And we need to integrate these tools. That will enable organizations to fulfill the governance needs and compliance regulations at all levels – with an integrated approach and avoiding investing in point solutions.

By the way: If you as a vendor feel that you fall in that category (for AD and file servers, for SharePoint, for SAP), just keep us informed. We might have you on our watchlist but given that this is a market with many smaller vendors in, we might have missed you until now…

SAP recently has announced that their SAP NetWeaver Identity Management 7.1 now includes an SAML 2.0 Identity Provider – it requires the Service Pack (or Support Pack) Stack 5 (by the way: who at SAP is responsible for product names??? SAP BusinessObjects GRC Access Control; SAP NetWeaver Identity Management 7.1 SP Stack 5;…).

SAP is commited to SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) for a while now – and SAML 2.0 support is found at many places in the SAP portfolio. SAP systems can act as service providers in federation scenarios, with SAML 2.0 enabling the Single Sign-On and sharing of identity-related information. Using the identity provider within SAP NW IDM 7.1 SP 5 (to keep the name short and make it even more cryptic) allows to use a centralized view on identities within federation. The product can provide the unified view on identities which is a foundation for federation. Without identity information quality, there is no successful federation: Garbage in, garbage out.

The enhancement of the product shows where SAP is heading: It is a central element within the SAP NW infrastructure which provides all the identity services required in that infrastructure. There is tight integration with SAP products, but as well support for standards to integrate external applications – like with SAML 2.0 and the inherent support for Non-SAP service providers as well.

The other important enhancement in SP 5 are the Identity Reporting Capabilities based on SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse. That enhances the reporting capabilities of SAP NW IDM 7.1 – but it requires to have the Business Warehouse product in place. Anyhow, the enhancements clearly demonstrate the strategy of SAP for NetWeaver Identity Management: A central piece in the SAP infrastructure, well integrated, and with standards support. The enhancements demonstrate another point: SAP is executing on its strategy consequently. Maybe a little too quiet, but they are moving forward.

Yesterday, Quest announced the acquisition of Völcker Informatik. I’ve blogged about the impact on the IAM (and especially the Identity Provisioning) market yesterday. In this post, I’ll focus on the impact on existing customers. Acquisitions are always a situation where FUD arises – fear, uncertainty, doubt. There are many examples of acquisitions where customers were on the looser’s side afterwards, because their products of choice were (or are) supported only for a limited time before they had to migrate to another product. I won’t bash on vendors here who have acted like that – you all probably know some examples for that situation.

When looking at Völcker customers, there shouldn’t be much FUD. Völcker will continue it’s development in Germany and the leading people will stay on board. Even more, Völcker will have significantly bigger resources available – and given that Völcker is very innovative and has also a strong understanding of IT Service Management, the customers should benefit from that. Beyond that, Völcker as part of Quest is a global player instead of a Hidden Gem which is “world-known in Germany” only. With other words: There are many opportunities and I don’t see much risks. For sure an integration process might slow down things a little. But Quest is experienced enough in integrating acquisitions to mitigate these risks.

On the other side, there are the Quest ARS (Active Roles Server) customers. What is in for them? Quest ARS started as a tool for better, role-based management of Active Directory environments. Today it supports also some other systems. However, it is still Active Directory-centric. Quest has stated that both tools, Völcker ActiveEntry and Quest ARS, will play a vital role in their further strategy, with strong integration between both tools. Thus, Quest ARS remains a strong solution for Active Directory environments. And if it is about heterogeneous environments, ActiveEntry comes into play. It will be interesting to see how much Quest will invest in ARS support for heterogeneous systems. That probably is a slight risk for customers. But overall, the risk is relatively low.

Chances are good that this turns out to be one of the acquisitions where customers of both parties can benefit in the future. The reason is simple: There isn’t that much overlap between the portfolios. And, from the KuppingerCole perspective, there is much more potential for synergies well beyond IAM and Identity Provisioning.

By the way: There are several reports available at www.kuppingercole.com/reports – on Quest products as well as Völcker products, and there is the Hidden Gem report which covers Völcker as the not-so-hidden-anymore vendor.

Today, Quest announced that they will acquire the German Völcker Informatik AG with its ActiveEntry product, a leading-edge identity provisioning solutions with some integrated Access Governance capabilities. From my perspective, that is a very interesting acquisition, which brings Quest into a leading position in the overall IAM market. Until now, Quest has been a provider of several point solutions around IAM issues. They had some provisioning capabilities in their ActiveRoles Server before – but it hasn’t been the technical leading-edge product but more an add-on for some provisioning for Active Directory and a little beyond.

Right now, they are one of the vendors in the market which have solutions in most of the areas of IAM. They have one of the (from a technology perspective) definitely leading-edge products in the markets for identity provisioning. And they have a lot of complementary solutions. Beyond that, ActiveEntry fits very well into the Quest portfolio by supporting Active Directory environments at a high level but going well beyond that. Thus, it is sort of the perfect fit.

Quest right now is a full competitor of the big and established ones in the market like Oracle, IBM, Novell, and the others. It is in an interesting competitive position regarding Microsoft, Omada and related vendors. And, if you look at the number of people working around IAM, Quest is also from that perspective one of the vendors with the biggest potential in the market. With other words: This acquisition will heavily affect the IAM market and Quest will be one of the vendors to really take into account now.

There are several reports on Quest and Völcker from KuppingerCole available at www.kuppingercole.com/reports. Have a look at them (or ask us for advice…).

It became pretty quiet around directory services during the last years. When I remember the discussions back some 10, 15 or 20 years around NDS versus LAN Manager (and the underlying domain approach) or Active Directory when it came to market, and even the discussions which came up in the early days of OpenLDAP, it is pretty quiet nowadays. Are all the problems solved? Are the right directories in place? Are the best solutions chosen when something changes?

When talking with end user organizations it becomes obvious that we are far away from that state. There are implementations of different directories, and most of them work well for their specific use case. But once it comes to optimization, the situation changes. What to put in the Active Directory, what not? How to optimize the way applications are dealing with directories? How to best build a corporate directory or a meta directory (the directory as data store, not the meta directory service as technology for synchronization!)? How to interface directories for specific use cases and how to best retrieve information?

There are many aspects to discuss and to understand to end up with an optimized “directory infrastructure”. First of all, it is important to understand which directories you have and how they are used – usually there are far more directories out there than you’d expect. And I’m not only talking about the Active Directory, eDirectory and all the LDAP servers, but as well about “de facto” directories in the form of tables in databases and so on. I’m talking about anything which acts as a directory. That includes the application directories, which might be hundreds of small directories. And they sometimes contain sensitive information like privacy-relevant data. Besides this, they frequently have somewhat redundant data. Based on this analysis, you can drill down and identify which attributes have to flow between which directories in which use cases.

The latter is more about really optimizing your provisioning. The analysis is, on the other hand, as well a good foundation for optimizing your directory infrastructure. Where can you avoid redundancy?

Based on such an overview, you can think about some other aspects:

• Which central directories do you need for which use cases?
• How to optimize application access on directories?
• Where do you need specific technology for these directories beyond standard LDAP?

There is always a need for some more or less central directories. The Active Directory or eDirectory are examples, used for the primary authentication of internal users and for many infrastructure services – but they can’t do anything. There are Corporate Directories for centralized access to corporate information. There are more technical meta directories as the “source of truth” about distributed information.

We have to think about optimizing the application directories. One or few centralized directories together with Virtual Directory Services which are offered for example by Radiant Logic, Oracle, and Symlabs are an interesting option do build such a centralized yet flexible infrastructure, with the Virtual Directory Service as interface layer.

And we have to look at specific use cases where we need specialized technology. There are some innovative vendors out there. UnboundID for high scalable environments, where others like Oracle, Novell, Siemens, and so on are active as well. eNitiatives with their ViewDS services for strong querying capabilities and the ability to easily build interfaces in a “yellow page” style to these directories.

My experience is, that there is still a lot of need to think about directory services – and there is a lot room for improvement in most IT environments. What is your view on that topic?

I’ve done several webinars around changing architectures for Identity Provisioning and Access Governance during the last few months. And new architectural approaches for Provisioning have been an important topic at the EIC for years. I’ve also written a report on Access Governance architectures recently. That is no surprise. Provisioning has to integrate with IT Service Management in some way. It has to support the standard systems where automation is key as well as other systems which either don’t support automation interfaces (unfortunately there are several apps out there which don’t provide integration points, including several important healthcare apps) or where automation is too expensive. Thus, it is not only about connectors. It is about a flexible support for different approaches, from manual workflows to full bi-directional automation.

For the core systems, it definitely makes sense to automate. Many transactions, high risks – these are reasons to invest in direct connectors. But there are many other systems out there which need to be connected as well. Even while there aren’t that many standard interfaces (Web Services, Command Line Interfaces, JDBC/ODBC, LDAP,…) which are commonly used to interact with target systems, the customization and integration is costly anyhow. “Connector fabrics” and other approaches help, but typically organizations end up with some systems which are tightly connected and others which aren’t.

There are many approaches to integrate these systems. There might be specific provisioning tools (FIM/ILM, Quest ARS, and others for Active Directory; SAP NW IDM for SAP;…) in place which can be integrated with other provisioning systems. There might be existing processes based on SRM (Service Request Management) tools. There might be the need for additional manual workflows and some access governance to track whether the manual actions have been performed or not.

With other words: Flexibility is key. Flexibility for architectures, where Identity Provisioning and Access Governance tools are just one element – there might be more than one Provisioning tool, there might be SRM, existing workflows, the integration of Provisioning and Access Governance, interfaces to Enterprise Portals, and so on. And flexibility for connections to systems, by not only relying on automation.

Interestingly, I had some briefings in the last few weeks where vendors – like Courion and Aveksa – highlighted new capabilities which are exactly targeted on this. There are other vendors which started with that before. However, it seems to become a major trend right now – open, flexible architectures for Provisioning and Access Governance. For customers, that means that they have to think a little more about the adequate architecture. On the other hand, that might save them significantly more money by choosing an approach which really fits to what they have.

Hope to see you at EIC 2010 in Munich, May 4th to 7th, 2010.

In these days the industry talks a lot about IT GRC, Risk Management, Access Governance, Identity for the Cloud, and so on. However, we should keep in mind that the vast majority of organizations still have to do a lot of homework around basic Identity and Access Management.  And, even more: That’s the foundation for many of the other things like Access Governance, because it’s not only about auditing but as well about managing (and, honestly, it’s much more about managing and enforcing preventive controls than of auditing in a reactive way, isn’t it?).

Thus, you shouldn’t ignore Identity Provisioning, Virtual Directory Services (still one of the most valuable technologies in IAM and one of the best hidden secrets at the same time), or Enterprise SSO. You will find a lot of Podcasts of Webinar recordings at our website. Thus, I won’t analyze everything around that but focus on some few points why we still should consider the core IAM market as relevant:

• Provisioning tools have matured over the past years – and they support many of the “new” features like access certification frequently. Thus you can do a lot of things relying only on these “basic” tools instead of adding too much on top of them. Not all, but a lot. That has to be carefully analyzed but in several cases, one tool definitely is the better solution than multiple tools. That’s like in real life: There are advantages for the multi-tool, there are advantages for the specialized tools.
• If you look at the market, than there are relatively few really big organizations. Most of them have some IAM. But, correctly, most of them have more than one IAM approach and implementation. Thus, they have integration issues which is an important market, with many architectural options to solve this. And, beyond that, in these large organizations you frequently can observe a tendendy to implement some point solutions in some areas – for example an additional provisioning tool for some specific systems. Given that, there is still a lot of work to do and a lot of potential, for example in providing the provisioning tool which integrates other provisioning tools.
• The medium-sized businesses frequently don’t have much provisioning and other IAM solutions in place. Thus, there is a huge market opportunity, as well for on-premise as cloud-based solutions.
• Some implementations might be worth a review with respect to today’s requirements and solutions. There is always room for updates and even replacements.

The reason why there is somewhat fewer attention of the marketing departments of vendors on that segment (at list when looking at some vendors which have not only provisioning) is simple: Provisioning is hard to sell. E-SSO is easier to sell. Access Governance might be even easier than that. Thus, looking at the low-hanging fruits instead of focusing on products with a long sales-cycle and a lot of competition, appears to be logical from a sales perspective. However, that leaves a large portion of the market blank and it doesn’t fill the pipeline sufficiently for a time where the low-hanging fruits might have been picked.

It’s not up to me to judge about vendor marketing and sales strategies. But it is interesting to observe what is happening in the market. And that might be one reason for the relative success of several of the smaller vendors in many markets (by the way: some large vendors are very active in the “classical” segments – innovative, focused,…).

From a customer perspective, the buzz and fuzz around the new topics might divert the focus from the things which have to be done as a foundation, on which other things can be built. Thus customers always should keep in mind that they can’t be successful without doing their homework. And that includes to provide a solid foundation for provisioning – with an adequate architecture for the customer’s requirements. I’ll blog about these architectures soon but you might as well look here - I’ve touched the topic in this webinar.

Don’t miss the European Identity Conference 2010 and its Best Practice presentations to learn more about this. See you in Munich, May 4th to 7th.

German vendor Beta Systems, one of the well established vendors in the core IAM market, e.g. provisioning (notably, they provide other solutions as well), has recently unveiled the new version of its provisioning product, now called SAM Enterprise Identity Manager – in contrast to its former name SAM Jupiter. That highlights that this product is part of a specific market segment, the identity provisioning products – most of them are named “Identity Manager”. It as well shows that Beta Systems understands this release as a really major release.

And, in fact, it is. Amongst the broad set of new features, there are two really important ones:

• Beta Systems has finally managed to merge the two releases of its product. Until now, there has been a host-based and a Windows/UNIX based version. The new version runs on all platforms and has, in addition, broader platform support as well for databases and other infrastructure components. Thus, maintenance and development right now is easier for Beta Systems. And, furthermore, customers can now much easier pick their platform of choice.
• Beta Systems has added multi-tenancy capabilities, being amongst the first provisioning vendors to do that. That is not only interesting to (external and internal) service providers but as well to large organizations in industries with strong compliance regulations which for example have to enforce different segments of IT administration for different parts of the organization – like sometimes in banks.

I especially like the multi-tenancy approach because that will become a mandatory feature in provisioning tools over time.

These days I have been talking with Siemens on enhancements for their DirX Identity product, a provisioning tool (and, by the way, a pretty good one). Amongst the new features is some support for Privileged Account Management (PAM). That’s interesting. I’ve blogged some time ago about the possibility of provisioning vendors starting to acquire PAM vendors and adding these capabilities to their provisioning products.

Siemens didn’t acquire but implemented some own technology. They mainly focus on providing one-time passwords for the use of privileged accounts and re-setting these passwords after use. This is combined with strong authentication, using smartcards. In fact it is sort of a mix between product (resetting passwords and all that stuff) and project (adding strong authentication using other products). But finally they became a pioneer in integrating PAM with provisioning.

There is no doubt that the leading PAM suites like the ones provided by Cyber-Ark or Lieberman Software provide a much broader feature set. However, integrating that with provisioning tools, identity lifecycles, and existing (self) service interfaces is a valid approach. I expect other vendors to follow, adding PAM support as well. However, the specialists will provide a more sophisticated solution at least for a pretty long period of time (unless they become acquired…).

But what Siemens has done proves my thesis on PAM moving into provisioning, servicing the specific requirements of customers. And it proves that PAM is moving from a niche topic towards a mainstream technology in the broader IAM market.

Regarding the term PAM (or PIM or PUM): I prefer Privileged Account Management because it is about accounts which are associated to a person and their digital identity. The user is sometimes associated with an account, sometimes more understood as a construct in between, e.g. a user-ID with some accounts associated and sometimes the situation that some person with one digital identity could have multiple user-IDs. For what is managed, PAM seems to be the most appropriate term, from my point of view.

IBM yesterday has announced its Tivoli Identity Manager 5.1. If you read the list of new features you might end up with the same question like me: Why is it only version 5.1, e.g. a minor (.1) release instead of TIM 6? Amongst the new features are fundamental things like Role Management, SoD support, attestation and, last not least, support for some Privileged Account Management (or Privileged Identity Management, the term IBM is using). With other words: IBM has significantly expanded the feature set of its product, mainly adding a lot of IAM-GRC features to what TIM delivers. Given that they have some other interesting solutions in the GRC space, especially for analytics and dashboards, IBM definitely improves its positioning in that emerging market segment.

So the GRC stuff is one of the new areas in TIM 5.1. That’s nice, but we have seen that before. Many vendors have either added such features to their products or have released separate GRC platforms – with advantages and disadvantages in both approaches. IBM in fact has tied in that area.

Much more interesting is the addition of PIM capabilities to a provisioning solution. Even while not every aspect of PIM will be solved by what TIM 5.1 delivers, that fulfills my expectations of PIM becoming more and more part of provisioning tools – which is just logical, given that it is about managing accounts. IBM is the first vendor in the market who delivers an integration in that area. Novell might become a close follower given that they have recently acquired a PIM vendor.

With these additions, IBM would have gould reasons to name the release of TIM as version 6.0 instead of 5.1. But understanding the reasons for version numbers is definitely amongst the hardest things in IT.

However, IBM shows that they are intensively acting to improve their positioning in the IAM and GRC market space. Being one of the first big companies which had entered that market, there hasn’t been that much evolution for some time. But now IBM is definitely back and moving forward significantly, acting as a strong competitor for the other players in the market. And once they deliver on full GRC solutions, beyond IAM-GRC and access controls (and IBM is amongst the ones who might deliver on that given their strengths in areas like SIEM, ITSM, and others…) IBM might even further improve its positioning.