Identity Governance of Unstructured Data

I received an email from SailPoint this morning. It has just published a white paper on how to secure access to unstructure data. 

It examines each of the organizational and technical barriers to securing unstructured data and provides practical advice on how IAM managers should respond to this risk. It explains how identity governance can be extended to better secure unstructured data to meet privacy and compliance requirements.

So far, there are only 2 products that can govern unstructured data. 1 from SailPoint (I think they bought over a product called WhiteBox). The other is One Identity Manager - Data Governance.

Identity Manager - Data Governance Edition protects your organization by giving access control to the business owner rather than the IT staff. The business owner can grant access to sensitive data. With the Identity Manager restricted access functionality, you define access policies for your organization. You have the power to analyze, approve and fulfill unstructured data access requests to files, folders and shares across NTFS, NAS devices and SharePoint, ensuring that sensitive, unstructured data is only accessible to approved users.

The primary targets are Windows Shared Folders/Files, especially within SharePoint.

I know there is already a project on-going in Australia that adopts Identity Manager - Data Governance Edition. Wishing them a successful implementation!


In my opinion, Data Governance is quick to win (for Sales), but very hard to exit (for Implementers).

Will I take this up? :)


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Gartner Magic Quadrant - IGA 2017

I woke this morning and received an email from SailPoint. It maintains as the leader in Identity Governance & Administration (IGA) market as named by Gartner for Q1, 2017.

Not a surprise for me to see SailPoint up there in the chart. 

What really surprised me is how RSA has been dropped from Challengers quadrant to Niche Players quadrant after being merged with Dell Technologies. As far as I know, there is no change to the product line. 

Another surprise is CA Technologies has managed to move from Visionaries quadrant to Leaders quadrant. This is largely due to 2 changes, from our own experience.

1) CA Identity Portal

This is a product developed by a company SIGMA recently bought over by CA. With this Identity Portal in place, the user experience has improved drastically.

The old UI looks similar to the one shown below. Sucks big time!

2) CA Identity Suite Virtual Appliance

The Virtual Appliance is a full-featured deployment of CA Identity Suite, pre-installed and pre-configured in a virtual machine image format. Installation is no longer needed.

If you have experience installing Oracle and CA products, you will know what I meant by "pain-in-the-xxx" during installation. Due to the complexity in the various components within the same product, installation takes forever and this eats into the professional service man-days. And overall, your total pricing will not be attractive!

The Virtual Appliance supports a variety of deployment options and is available from CA Identity Suite 12.6.8 CR1 onwards.


Note: I have not read the report in detail yet and have no idea how the evaluation was made. Above is my own personal experience using the 2 products. 

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Mobile Device Management - Part II

In October, I blogged about Mobile Device Management and I was thinking aloud about how a traditional IDM product can add-on a new feature to provision to a MDM product.

  

The next feature will definitely be able to bridge the gap between identities from enterprise customers (most likely, in-house Microsoft Active Directory) and MDM products. I do not think we should cross the path of building a MDM product from scratch. That would be too far-fetching. 

This would be a one-stop solution.

This morning, an email came from SailPoint announcing the release of IdentityIQ 6.2. 

Dream comes true! Yes, indeed.

Highlights of what’s included in the new release:

• First of its kind integration with mobile device management (MDM) solutions from AirWatch, Good and MobileIron
• Re-styled user interface with crisp, clean look-and-feel
• Expanded scalability support for critical IAM processes
• Enhanced administrative user experience with improvements to workflow and quick link configuration
• Separation-of-duty (SoD) policy simulation
• End user tablet support (iPad)
• Integration support for STEALTHbits, Cyber-Ark and Microsoft FIM
• Expanded healthcare integration with Epic & GE Centricity connectors

These days, any IAMS product will want to get "friendly" with mobile devices. Why not? It's a super huge market in the mobile space.

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