IDENTITY AND PRIVACY MANAGEMENT

The identity management (IdM) market continues to evolve rapidly as vendors respond to increased demands for enterprise solutions that improve business agility, increase security, meet growing regulatory pressures, and support web services applications. Recently, a number of acquisitions have resulted in large, name brand vendors with comprehensive IdM offerings, affecting all sizes of enterprises. Catalyst Conference will examine market dynamics, focus on how they impact enterprise customers, review the state of integrated IdM suites, and assess emerging technologies.

Catalyst Conference IdM sessions will also focus on a number of individual technology segments that are at the top of all enterprise architects issue lists. User provisioning is an especially active segment where many enterprises are evaluating products or are already in the midst of deployment. Presentations will cover how provisioning solutions have matured, but still require a heavy dose of professional services to implement; the state of provisioning standards, case studies representing recent deployments, and a discussion of future trends for provisioning.

While provisioning focuses on credential creation and maintenance, other aspects of business policy and process are responsible for identity assurance. Sensitivity to identity theft and fraud has resulted in heightened focus on stronger identity proofing as well as stronger authentication. Catalyst Conference will provide a forum for discussing how process and technology need to combine to meet growing threats to e-commerce applications.

Federated identity standards and products reached some consolidation in 2005, but new developments are in the offing for 2006. Most federation products will have support for SAML 2.0 and deployments begin to migrate forward during this period. But, 2006 is the first year with ADFS on the market and the WS-SX Technical Committee is expected to deliver a version 1.0 standards. Burton Group covers these and other issues impacting the federation market to gauge success and look to future developments.

All IdM activity must be viewed through the prism of privacy considerations. Global enterprises have acute challenges when navigating the various privacy laws and regulations. Presentations will examine privacy issues and present enterprise experiences on how to deal with this sensitive topic. One approach to addressing privacy is the recent introduction of user-centric IdM concepts, where end users can exercise more control over attribute sharing.