Burton Group Identity Blog

Two Bonuses for Privacy Professionals

There are plenty of reasons to come to Catalyst. Engaging workshops, great sessions, interesting speakers, the chance to see the entire Identity and Privacy Strategies team on stage with bags on their heads -  you know, the kinds of thing you’d expect.  For those of you with a Certified Information Privacy Professional (CIPP) certification, this year we’ve a little something extra for you – continuing education credits. By attending IdPS’ Privacy Risks Get Real track, you’ll earn 3.5 hours of continuing privacy education (CPE) credit. Attend SRMS’ Risk Management: Programs You Can’t Afford to Cut and receive another 3.5 hours of credit.

And here's a second bonus: we are making it easier than ever for you privacy professionals out there who haven’t attended a Catalyst before to attend this year. By registering with promo code IAPP, you’ll be able to attend the conference at $300 off the Early Bird rate.  See you in July!

Blogger: Ian Glazer

The beginning of the beginning: our privacy report publishes

Blogger: Ian Glazer

Over the last 6 or so months, Bob Blakley and I have been doing a lot of listening and thinking about privacy.  To successfully re-launch our privacy coverage, we needed to lay a wide foundation that would serve to support future research.  We needed to provide a meaningful starting point for our customers.  Since our customers’ jobs are not typically focused on privacy, we needed to start with a form of first principles and build outward. 

I’ve learned that it is generally frowned upon to use the second person in our reports – too informal I am told.  Use the blog if you want to address the audience directly.  Normally, I don’t have a problem avoiding the second person, but this report proved to be a challenge.  We had to work hard not to write without using “you.”  And why was that? Privacy discussions are and must be inclusive.  They involve each of us on a far more personal level than a discussion of, say, account lifecycle management.   Cognizant of privacy implications or not, the decisions you make on a daily basis have effects the privacy of your customers and partners.

Because privacy is personal, because it requires concerted behavior throughout the enterprise, discussions about privacy must include everyone.  You.  Me.  Everyone. To guide concerted behavior, in our recently released privacy report, we put forth a Golden Rule as a means of developing and evaluating privacy principles leadings to practices and behaviors:

We protect privacy when we consider the dignity of individuals about whom we know things, and when we use what we know about them only in ways which preserve and enhance that dignity.

This report is by no means the end of our exploration of privacy – it is just the beginning.  We will continuing the conversation this July, at Catalyst North America, in the “Privacy Risks Get Real” track.  We are working hard to ensure that these discussions reflect the inclusive nature of privacy.  We’ll be exploring privacy concerns across multiple domains: from healthcare to higher education.  Finally, to sweeten the deal, we have worked with the International Association of Privacy Professionals to get some of the tracks at Catalyst approved for Continuing Privacy Education credits.  We are looking forward to continuing the privacy conversations with all of you this July!

Speaking of Catalyst, we have special surprise for IdPS blog readers… Since it is Easter egg hunting season, we’ve placed a couple of them on the Catalyst web site. The prize inside is a super discount code to attend Catalyst. To find the eggs, go to the conference web site and do this:

• Hover (but don't click) over the "San Diego" icon for 20 seconds

-or-

• Click and hold on the Catalyst logo and then drag your mouse off and release

Register right away – this discount is limited to 50 users and could disappear at any time!

Is a bad economy good for identity?

Blogger: Lori Rowland

The financial meltdown of 2008-2009 has had a significant impact on the identity management market, but it might not be in the way you expect.  Organizations have undergone significant business transformation including mergers and acquisitions, business closures, restructuring, outsourcing, layoffs, furloughs, and terminations.  These changes have highlighted the need for effective identity management processes. 

One of the most obvious value propositions of identity management given today’s economic conditions is the de-provisioning of users’ and their access rights. The need for timely de-provisioning of access rights was recently exemplified by a situation at Fannie Mae.  Several news outlets have reported on an incident in which a contract employee was allowed to stay on premise for several hours after he was terminated. Worse yet, his network access was not revoked until even later that evening.  This gave him just enough time to place a malicious piece of code on Fannie Mae servers.  Luckily an observant engineer discovered the code before it was executed, otherwise the code would have brought down thousands of servers, most certainly impacting Fannie Mae’s bottom line. 

De-provisioning is not the only identity management benefit that comes to bear in a bad economy. For example, organizations want to ensure that the employees they have acquired (either through a new hire process or acquisition) are up and running on day one.  Others want to physically secure their environment and protect information and other assets– this is particularly true in environments where layoffs have occurred or in which the competition is fierce. Last, but not least, is the ever present need to meet compliance obligations – chances are the demand for stricter controls is only going to be increased due to the economic crisis.

Burton Group is in the process of updating our 2009 Identity Management Market Overview report.  As part of the research for this report we are reaching out to our customers in order to find out what impact the bad economy has had on their identity management (IdM) initiatives and project funding.  It is too early to give a final verdict, but early indications suggest that identity management initiatives are still going strong. As one organization put it “businesses are not willing to sacrifice controls, compliance, or security in order to cut costs.”  This is not to say that some projects are not being cut, we have seen some of that, but we are also seeing organizations move their identity management projects to the forefront and recommit to their success.

Another indication that the identity management market is thriving is the fact that vendors like Courion, Imprivata, Sentillion, and Sun have recently reported year over year growth and, in some cases, record growth for their identity management products.  This is just a sampling of vendors, we are certain that there are others who are also experiencing similar growth in their identity management product lines.

Although we are seeing interest in identity management growing, organizations are demanding alternatives to the traditional identity management suite or delivery model.  Organizations are looking at identity services for SOA based environments, outsourcing, hosted solutions, open source, subscription based licensing, and cloud based solutions all in an effort to reduce costs and simplify deployments.  Burton Group will be discussing this and other identity management trends in our forthcoming Identity Management Market Overview report and the Emerging Identity Services Market report.  We also will be deep diving into these topics at our Catalyst conference in July.

All in all –the bad economy seems to have been good for identity management.  It has not only brought the need for efficient identity management processes to the attention of organizations and subsequently boosted sales in identity management products, but has forced vendors to offer alternatives to the often bloated, identity management product delivery model.

Zen Mind, Newb Mind

Blogger: Ian Glazer

Being the new-ish addition to the IdPS team is, well, an interesting place to be.  Besides the requisite induction activities (ask me at Catalyst how you pick up the dry cleaning for a team who lives all across the country), I’ve been working with my peers on vastly different pieces of research.  And being curious by nature, I’m loving the chance to not only dig into different topics, but also observe how different people go about the actual process of analyzing a topic or a market.  One technique that Burton Group uses is Contextual Research (CR).  Essentially, the CR process is meant to challenge an analyst’s knowledge of a subject and their associated preconceived notions as to what problems enterprises face and how they are facing them.  It turns seasoned veterans, experts in the field, into beginners again.  This is what practitioners of Zen Buddhism call “beginner’s mind.”

Here’s how it works in a nutshell.  Kevin (seasoned vet) and Ian (newbie) identify a bunch of organizations to talk to.  So far nothing out of the ordinary as compared to our other approaches to research.  That being said, the conversations we have with these organizations is very different from typical research techniques.  Instead of coming to the conversation with a fixed hypothesis that we want to prove out, we come to the conversation with nothing.  No leading questions.  No surveys.  No preconceptions.

In these conversations, we, the analysts, are newbs. We let the people that we are talking to teach us what is important to them about a subject, how they have approached a problem, what wisdom they’d like to share with others.  The analysts furiously take notes, listen, and try not to talk.  Having listened to as many people as we can, we bring the whole team together to find affinities among the statements, identify trends and common techniques, and evaluate the state of a market through the eyes of a customer.

Right now, Kevin and I are in the midst of a role management CR.  Although, we are far too early in the process to comment on what we’ve found, some of the anecdotes we have learned along the way are really fascinating.  Discussions about the needs of the business, efficiencies gained, and methodologies for conducting role analysis – all of these conversations have been grounded firmly in the realities of today’s economy as well as current state of identity management in the enterprise.  You’ll see some of the results of this beginner’s mind approach to analysis at Catalyst this summer.  In fact, the Catalyst workshop on Advanced Role Management is going to be a master-class of a sort, shaped by what Kevin and I learn during this CR process.

Stay tuned for more on our roles CR.  Towards the end of April, I’ll be updating you on how the process has faired.