OpenID added

After moving my blog to its new location, I have started to look at how I can customise it and add functionality.

As an advocate of Identity Management and user-centric identity, I thought it only fitting that I add OpenID support as my first plugin. As a result, you will now find that in order to leave a comment on my blog you can either:

1) Register as normal
2) Use your OpenID.

This plugin is courtesy of Snaky and can be found here.

Application-Centric IdM – Is this not already here?

Defining Application-Centric IdM

Whilst catching up with everyones feeds after my recent holiday, I came across this post by Nishant Kaushik of Oracle about Application-Centric IdM and its definition.

During his post he states:

“The idea is that instead of each application having to build these
infrastructures as part of their functionality, they can just avail of
them as ready made, standards-based services. Application-centric IdM
moves away from the traditional system management style of IdM,
focusing instead on the creation of an IdM infrastructure that
customers deploy to expose these services for their applications to
plug into their own business processes. It makes identity (and
security) an integral, yet abstracted part of the development process.”

I’m not sure I fully understand the difference between what he is describing as Application-Centric IdM and Enterprise IdM as we have known it for some time.

He seems to be saying that you abstract the IdM and security requirements of the application out into a separate, open standards based layer and then use this from within your application. To me, this is what your access management application (a la SiteMinder, CoreID, Tivoli Access Manager etc) have been doing for years and what each of these vendors have further developed (mainly through acquisition) to encompass IdM as well (a la Identity Manager (CA), Identity Manager (Sun), Tivoli Identity Manager etc). Do these vendors not already provide the functionality that Nishant is referring to in this new term of Application-Centric IdM. Through the use of provisioning, it is already possible to manage application permissions from an abstracted and centralized platform.

I may have missed the point of Nishant’s post. If so, please feel free to correct me but at the moment I aren’t sure why there seems to be this new term for something that has been around for some time.

DON’T FORGET MY BLOG HAS NOW MOVED TO HTTP://BLOG.PDTOAL.COM

Application-Centric IdM – Is this not already here?

Defining Application-Centric IdM

Whilst catching up with everyones feeds after my recent holiday, I came across this post by Nishant Kaushik of Oracle about Application-Centric IdM and its definition.

During his post he states:

“The idea is that instead of each application having to build these
infrastructures as part of their functionality, they can just avail of
them as ready made, standards-based services. Application-centric IdM
moves away from the traditional system management style of IdM,
focusing instead on the creation of an IdM infrastructure that
customers deploy to expose these services for their applications to
plug into their own business processes. It makes identity (and
security) an integral, yet abstracted part of the development process.”

I’m not sure I fully understand the difference between what he is describing as Application-Centric IdM and Enterprise IdM as we have known it for some time.

He seems to be saying that you abstract the IdM and security requirements of the application out into a separate, open standards based layer and then use this from within your application. To me, this is what your access management application (a la SiteMinder, CoreID, Tivoli Access Manager etc) have been doing for years and what each of these vendors have further developed (mainly through acquisition) to encompass IdM as well (a la Identity Manager (CA), Identity Manager (Sun), Tivoli Identity Manager etc). Do these vendors not already provide the functionality that Nishant is referring to in this new term of Application-Centric IdM. Through the use of provisioning, it is already possible to manage application permissions from an abstracted and centralized platform.

I may have missed the point of Nishant’s post. If so, please feel free to correct me but at the moment I aren’t sure why there seems to be this new term for something that has been around for some time.

Gloria Gaynor does security

Gloria Gaynor and Security

Saw this great post by Emergent Chaos. It seems Gloria Gaynor now does security!

Excellent

DON’T FORGET MY BLOG HAS NOW MOVED TO HTTP://BLOG.PDTOAL.COM

Gloria Gaynor does security

Gloria Gaynor and Security

Saw this great post by Emergent Chaos. It seems Gloria Gaynor now does security!

Excellent

Giving an online Identity to the masses

Jason Kolb has recently been discussing here how the internet is forming an integral part of our lives. He further goes on to describe (here) his quite ingenious plan for giving out domain names to the masses. Not top-level domains as current internet savvy people have, but sub-domains that the ordinary “Joe Public” can have. As Jason states:

“Obviously, it’s not feasible to expect the general public to pay $7.99
a year for something as abstract as a domain name.  The only way to
really make this happen, I realized, is to give them away.  However,
it’s not realistic to think that there’s any possible way to buy
everyone on earth a domain name.  The registration fees alone would
just be massive.  However, you can give away sub-domain names, for absolutely nothing.”

What a great idea Jason! I can’t believe that no-one has thought of this before but it does appear that you are the first.

Not only does this make sense to allow more people to gain their own “online presence” but also removes the problem of finding unique top-level domain names. I know this too well already. Recently, I have jumped on the domain name ownership list by deciding to host my own online presence. When I went looking for a domain name to use I tried to two obvious ones (well obvious to me):

www.toal.com
www.paultoal.com

Both were already registered. Therefore, as you will see if you are reading this, I ended up opting for

www.pdtoal.com

What Jason is doing is minimising this problem. However, how long before I can’t register paultoal.atmy.name or pdtoal.myidentity.name because someone else has got them

DON’T FORGET MY BLOG HAS NOW MOVED TO HTTP://BLOG.PDTOAL.COM

Giving an online Identity to the masses

Jason Kolb has recently been discussing here how the internet is forming an integral part of our lives. He further goes on to describe (here) his quite ingenious plan for giving out domain names to the masses. Not top-level domains as current internet savvy people have, but sub-domains that the ordinary “Joe Public” can have. As Jason states:

“Obviously, it’s not feasible to expect the general public to pay $7.99
a year for something as abstract as a domain name.  The only way to
really make this happen, I realized, is to give them away.  However,
it’s not realistic to think that there’s any possible way to buy
everyone on earth a domain name.  The registration fees alone would
just be massive.  However, you can give away sub-domain names, for absolutely nothing.”

What a great idea Jason! I can’t believe that no-one has thought of this before but it does appear that you are the first.

Not only does this make sense to allow more people to gain their own “online presence” but also removes the problem of finding unique top-level domain names. I know this too well already. Recently, I have jumped on the domain name ownership list by deciding to host my own online presence. When I went looking for a domain name to use I tried to two obvious ones (well obvious to me):

www.toal.com
www.paultoal.com

Both were already registered. Therefore, as you will see if you are reading this, I ended up opting for

www.pdtoal.com

What Jason is doing is minimising this problem. However, how long before I can’t register paultoal.atmy.name or pdtoal.myidentity.name because someone else has got them