Endings, Beginnings, and Certification!

Hi folks, so it's been a while. 

That's mostly since I was blogging over on the wonderful SAP Community. Unfortunately, I will not be as active there now as my career is moving away from the wide, wonderful world of SAP as I have taken on a new position as a Regional Solutions Architect at Ping Identity.

This affords me the ability to explore new areas of the Identity Management landscape, and play with some technologies that I've always been very interested in but have not had the time to delve into. I'm hoping as I learn and experience more that I will get to share it with you folks.

Which leads me to the third item in this entry's title, certification. I guess they knew I was coming and how interested I am in getting certified in technologies as Ping has just announced a certification program!

If you use Ping products in your business, or do Ping related services work, this is something you should definitely look into, and look for.

Here's to the next stage of the career and certification journey!

#pingidentity #training #security #cybersecurity #certification

SailPoint Training

Not too bad when you get to go to two training classes in a row. Even better when they are on cool technologies like SAP NetWeaver Identity Manager and SailPoint's Identity IQ.

Had a great time and learned lots of stuff down in Austin, TX with the SailPoint team. Clearly, the IdM field continues to expand and redefine itself as a combination of regulation and security concerns demand better audit and compliance rules. Corporate Governance policies are finding themselves enforced as IT tools embrace certification and audit along with "old school" concepts such as user provisioning, password management and access control. I think SailPoint will be aggressively moving forward to complete this integration to produce a new "Compliance Driven" IdM model.

Given these developments, I find it hard to understand how Burton Group feels that "IdM is not aging gracefully" as pointed out in an abstract on Bob Blakely's latest paper, "Identity and Privacy Strategies Assessment (Single Instance Use Case)"

While I have the greatest respect for the folks at Burton, I have to say I cannot disagree more with this assessment. (Disclosure: I am not currently a Burton Group customer and as such only have access to the abstract and have not read the whole article)

IdM is rising to meet several challenges, as I have indicated above, and if there are architectural flaws it is due more to the fact that current providers are channeling the products to reflect their application suites. Oracle, SAP and Microsoft all embrace some part of their technologies for application serving or the front end or require specialized programming in the form of JAVA, Xpress or ABAP and are increasingly being engineered to work first with their own products and then addressing the rest of the enterprise (SAP is particularly guilty here)

I also foresee additional growth as IdM embraces new technologies in User Identification. A tighter integration between Biometrics, Smart Cards and other identifiers becomes more mainstream. However, before this can begin, IT and IS have to agree on standards and adoption of these identification methods.

Also let's not forget about the Specter of Federated Identity Services. While there have been several successful architectures developed, it's still one of the most complicated IdM scenarios out there. Perfecting the Federation Use Case and its easy deployment will kick off another chapter in IdM's steady evolution.

SAP IdM Training - Wrapup

The last day of the training was an excellent conclusion. We spent a few hours connecting to SAP JAVA and ABAP systems. In general the SAP connectors work quite well. I'll be much happier, however if the Trondheim development team creates real to/from SAP passes rather than relying on custom connectors, and of course, the end of the MMC management interface!

I also had more exposure to the new UI and as one SAP insider commented to me, what it lacks in flexibility, it makes up for in security and language localization, which I cannot disagree with. Even if a company in need of Identity Management is not a SAP shop, it should consider SAP NetWeaver IDM in environments where multiple languages need to be supported.

In general, I think the product is moving in the right direction. Looking forward to getting on some planned projects in the next few weeks, plus whatever else might come up!

SAP IdM Training Continued

Still impressed with the training class. I’ve found it interesting how they’ve been able to give the class a good flavor of how NetWeaver IdM works. I think the folks in the class are getting a solid foundation in what the product can do. Everyone in the class is looking forward to working with the SAP Provisioning framework which is the emphasis of the last day of class.

I also received a nice tip today. Take a look at this new document from SAP (I believe it is a general access document)

An interesting discussion of reconciliation from an ERP context. Most people typically reconcile against an enterprise directory, but when working with an ERP system as the authoritative source, it makes sense to have a reconciliation process against this system as well.

It's also been interesting seeing the general improvements to the product. While I miss the ease of installation, speed and flexibility of NW IDM 7.0 (Not to mention MaXware Identity Center) the new version shows better scalability than ever before. Little tweaks like adjusting the attention dispatchers should give to different task types, to improved role / management handling and event handling. The interface is not terrible and the WebDynPro UI lacks the flexibility of the old PHP, but it is a heckuva lot more functional, particularly where mutli-valued attributes , roles and privileges are concerned.

After SailPoint training and some customer facing work (gotta earn some money!) I'll be looking forward to setting up a lab environment for the rest of the IdM team at CTI. Once that's done we'll be up to giving some demonstrations to clients and other interested parties.

Long time since I ran an IdM demo...

I'll be sure to comment on the SAP Provisioning Framework sometime over the weekend.