Back to Basics

I was happy to read a recent posting by Dave Kearns and his overview of the NetProConference Survey results. Both Dave's synopsis and the actual survey are worth reading.

Specifically, I'd like to highlight the following taken directly from the survey results:

o User provisioning/ de-provisioning is the toughest challenge for IT organizations. 34% of respondents rate this area as “problematic” or “out of control” at their company.
o Delegating administrative rights (29%) and Compliance Reporting (27%) take 2nd and 3rd place as challenges.

From this, I'm still seeing that the basics of Identity Management, are still the key challenges to be faced by the CIO and IT department.

Without good controls on provisioning and deprovisioning, there is no foundation for compliance and security administration. Creation of central identity stores, and work-flows based on them is a requirement for building out any compliance or security framework. These applications require an authoritative store that can be used to make sure that authentication and authorization take place in the correct context.

Personally, the only flaw I saw in the survey was that it was very much centered in the Microsoft world and did not talk about any of the other players in the IdM world (SUN, Oracle, SAP, Sentillion, Hitachi, etc.) Of course given that NetPro is highly focused on the Microsoft world it's easy to understand. However, I cannot help but wonder how the survey results would change if the scope were somewhat expanded...