Join Us at Burton Catalyst – One of the best Identity focused events of 2010

July 27th, 2010

July 26, 2010

By Dieter Schuller, VP of Business Development

This year’s Burton Catalyst promises to be one of the best Identity focused events of 2010. I’ve been to every Catalyst Conference since it began, and I think that this year’s agenda—along with our hospitality suite!—are the most exciting ever.   Burton made it’s reputation in the identity area and now that they are part of Gartner, they have the resources and clout to really make this something special.  Gartner analysts are promising that this year’s event will be the best one ever held—and they’re backing that up with a 100% guarantee on your investment.

Great sessions highlighting Identity and Context Virtualization

This year, we are especially fortunate to have significant support from our customers, partners, and friends who come every year to learn what’s hot in IdM, get updates on products and upcoming releases, and celebrate with us in our suite. Many of our customers will be discussing their successful VDS use cases and deployments.

Don’t miss these sessions showcasing Identity and Context Virtualization:

The Emerging Identity Architecture
(Bob Blakley & Ian Glazer, Gartner/Burton Group)
Wednesday, July 28, 8:40 am

Manage globally, Act locally: How Identity & Context Virtualization Solved Complex Security and Data Integration Issues for Intel Corporation
(Steve Price, Intel Corporation)
Wednesday, July 28, 11:20 pm

Directory Services, Federation, and the Cloud
(Mark Diodati, Gartner/Burton Group)
Wednesday, July 28, 2:00 pm

The Industry Perspective on Cloud-Based Identity Challenges
(Industry Panel)
Wednesday, July 28, 2:35 pm

Leveraging Directory Services Virtualization to Integrate Identities for Enterprise Social Networking
(Ken Durazzo, Cisco Systems)
Wednesday, July 28, 3:10 pm

Backend Attribute Exchange: From Profile to Usage
(Anil John, Johns Hopkins University – APL)
Wednesday, July 28, 4:10 pm

Vendor Lightning Round 1
Wednesday, July 28, 5:05 pm

Join us for free drinks and free-ranging conversation—You could even win an iPad!

I’d like to invite you to visit our hospitality suite on Wednesday, July 28, 2010, 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm on the Aqua Patio.

We’ll be serving up delicious fare and refreshing libations, all with beautiful ocean views and the chance to get updates on ID-Connect, our free social media interface offering user profile management, white pages, and enterprise-wide search capabilities. Plus, the first 300 attendees can register to win one of three iPads and several other prizes.

I’d love to discuss your IdM infrastructure and initiatives

Finally, if you are at Catalyst and would like to meet 1:1 with me for a drink or to discuss your latest IdM initiatives, please shoot me an email at dschuller@radiantlogic.com or call me at 630-810-1294.

Look forward to seeing you in San Diego.

Dieter

For more information, visit http://www.radiantlogic.com/main/ or download a 45-day free trial. Follow Radiant Logic on Twitter and on LinkedIn. Fan us on Facebook.

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Upcoming Webinar: Virtualization’s Role in the Emerging Identity Landscape

July 14th, 2010

By Elle Fredericks, Marketing Communications

In his recent paper, “The Emerging Architecture of Identity Management,” Gartner analyst Bob Blakely laid out a roadmap for a new identity management infrastructure. As a follow up, Bob will be joining Radiant Logic’s Dieter Schuller, Vice President of Sales and Business Development, for an upcoming webinar. The two will detail the new infrastructure as recommended by Gartner, and how Radiant Logic identity and context virtualization can help you implement it.

Needed: New Ways to Manage Identity

Over time, it has become increasingly difficult to build an integrated identity structure. As enterprises have added new audiences and acquired new companies, identities can no longer be managed the same way. What used to work—centralized authentication and authorization—no longer serves today’s far-flung, federated, and even cloud-based infrastructures.

The first challenge within such an evolving environment is to integrate identity and context for security and privacy. In order to do this, you need:

  1. A single view of identity through integration.
  2. A way to externalize security context (or any relevant context) out of existing data/application silos.
  3. The ability to join identity and context.
  4. And finally, the ability to scale in volume while providing the highest speed.

Until now, this has been an impossible task. But Bob and Dieter will give specifics on how these complex issues can be solved, and the answer is simple: Implement a virtual directory—but not just any virtual directory. You need a solution that will provide full support for an identity and context virtualization service.

Don’t Miss the Webinar!

Our upcoming webinar on July 17th at 8am PST will cover the new identity management infrastructure and the details for how to implement it within your unique identity environment.

Find out more:

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You Don’t Want to Miss This One, Folks!

July 8th, 2010

By Alex Rock, Radiant Logic Director of Marketing

At Radiant, we’ve known for some time that an overhaul of identity management architecture is required and it’s great to know we’re not alone.  Gartner VP and Research Director, Bob Blakely shares our opinion and has even laid out a roadmap for a new identity infrastructure in his latest research paper, “The Emerging Architecture of Identity Management.” We couldn’t be more pleased that someone with such a respected voice—and a Gartner analyst no less!—is sharing the same story we’ve been telling for years.

The World of Identity is Changing—and Identity and Context Virtualization is Key

Your current identity management infrastructure is built for a world that no longer exists—one based on pushing identity from the center, instead of pulling it from many disparate sources. Today’s centralized identity infrastructure can’t keep up with tomorrow’s demands. Understanding this quandary is critical for you and the future of your enterprise.

Cloud computing, federation, and the need to scale are quickly changing the identity landscape and emphasizing the need for a transformation. Companies still struggling to solve today’s IdM challenges in their increasingly federated environments are now required to plan and account for tomorrow’s modern architectures, such as user-centric identity, Identity-as-a-service, and the cloud. Current enterprise IdM systems, designed to centralize management of the information used to authenticate employees and authorize their access to enterprise resources, simply won’t get us there.

According to Bob, the emerging identity infrastructure will be based on pulling identity from disparate sources at the time of use, and it will feature identity and context virtualization at its core—you’ve probably heard us talk about that a time or two! In addition to his recent paper, Bob also laid out his vision of a pull-based identity management architecture at Burton Catalyst EU in Prague at the end of June. Ian Glazer, also of Gartner, recapped it nicely in his blog.

Join us at Catalyst and Don’t Miss our Upcoming Webinar!

We’re gearing up for Catalyst North America in San Diego at the end of this month, where we will be showcasing some exciting new products. But before heading down to sun and surf, we invite you to join us for our next webinar on Thursday, July 15th at 8:00 a.m. PST, when Bob Blakely will expand on his groundbreaking research paper and Radiant’s Dieter Schuller will discuss Identity and Context Virtualization and give some tips on selecting this critical component of the new identity infrastructure.

Don’t miss this discussion on:

  • Why the current push model no longer works in today’s identity landscape.
  • How virtualization finally separates the production and storage of identities from their consumption.
  • How explicit context representation and externalization will drive finer-grained authorization and profile management—and change the way you relate to your customers.
  • How you can use smart virtualization to deliver identity and context as a service and create a complete IdM infrastructure for all your initiatives.

>> Sign up for the webinar

Learn more about Identity and Context Virtualization or catch us at Catalyst in San Diego for a demo of our new ID-Connect product.

Hope to see you there!

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The Five Challenges of Identification

May 4th, 2010

Part 2 of 6 on the subjects of authentication and authorization

By Lisa Grady, Product Manager

In my previous post, The Overlooked Step in the Authentication Process: Bring Your Security to the Next Level with Improved Identification, I discussed the importance of identification within the realm of authentication. Now let’s take a look at the challenges you face with this process:

    1. Identities are often distributed among many heterogeneous data sources. As companies expand services to constituents outside the enterprise, identity integration becomes even more difficult, with an increasing number of disparate data sources to integrate. And that’s not all that’s on the rise; as you move your identities to the web, user bases that once numbered in the low hundred thousands can rapidly increase to millions. It’s very challenging to quickly identify a high volume of users across so many sources.
    2. Each identity silo manages schema elements and data structures differently, which further complicates how information is reached. For example, “Name” can be represented as givenName in source A, FNAME in source B, and FirstName in source C.
    3. Each data source supports its own access mechanism. LDAP may be used to reach information in a directory, SQL reaches information stored in a database, and web services reach identities within an application. This makes it difficult to reach a designated source without the proper access tool.
    4. User overlap is practically guaranteed. While the identifiers for a user—such as logon name—may be different, you’re likely to find duplication across different data sources. One person may be found in several silos, each with its own definition of an identity.
    5. Most WAM applications are not equipped to handle multiple identity sources or protocols. When an application searches for a user, it typically expects to find that person within a single repository—but that’s not how today’s heterogeneous identity environments work. While some sophisticated applications may offer some sort of round-robin searching to find the correct sources, they’re not really built to handle high volumes or requests that return more than one result.

    So in order to provide a reliable authentication service, you must deal with multiple data sources, different schemas, unique access mechanisms, and duplicated identities—within an environment that features increasingly disparate data sources and a growing number of users.

    With the numbers of identities and data sources growing substantially more complex, integration is essential in order to properly handle authentication. The only solution for such a multifaceted infrastructure would be to combine these resources into a unique “logical list” —stay tuned for more on this topic!—that works with existing identity silos. This is part of what we call “Manage Globally, Act Locally,” where you integrate identities to create a clean global list of all your users for the identification phase, while delegating the credential checking aspect of authentication back to the authoritative sources.

    In my next post, we’ll look at how identity and context virtualization can help you build that global list, so you can integrate your identities and authenticate more effectively across heterogeneous systems.

    Are you currently battling some of the authentication challenges I discuss here? Join the conversation or send me an email at blog@radiantlogic.com.

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    Get More from Your SharePoint Deployment with Identity and Context Virtualization: Go Beyond Documents and Connect to the Rest of the World

    April 25th, 2010

    By Dieter Schuller, VP of Sales and Business Development

    We all know that SharePoint is a great tool for sharing documents. Unfortunately, it doesn’t integrate easily with the rest of your enterprise, including non-Microsoft applications and data sources. And documents alone are not enough—to be really useful, your portal needs to bring together all your users and connect to all your applications.

    The SharePoint integration challenge: Why it’s so difficult to connect with the rest of the world

    In order to make SharePoint a truly collaborative tool, you need to extend access beyond your employee base, to customers, partners, and vendors. Unfortunately, all of these populations are stored within different data silos, each with their own schemas and protocols. Without a virtualization layer, it’s not easy to authenticate across diverse user bases or authorize the appropriate access to each resource.

    Five ways Identity and Context Virtualization can help

    1. More Users, Less Hassle: SharePoint offers only a static definition of your user groups, so it’s difficult to add or manage new populations without spending a lot on custom coding. RadiantOne virtualization gives you a single logical view of all your users, without any overlap or duplications, so it’s easier to add populations and manage access to your portal.
    2. Powerfully Simple Security: Information about users is often scattered across different systems. RadiantOne lets you build a complete profile, bringing together all the attributes for each person, regardless of where or how they’re stored—so you can perform finer-grained authorization and enforce policies contextually.
    3. 360-degree Access to Data: SharePoint struggles when dealing with the structured data that’s found in your enterprise applications—especially when they’re not based on a Microsoft platform. RadiantOne lets you search across both your documents and your enterprise application stores so you can access everything, and see it all in context.
    4. Seamless User Experience: Instead of forcing the average user to master every system, RadiantOne offers a common interface that lets everyone search across systems, just like you’d search a term on the web. So your users have secure access to all the information they need, wherever they are.
    5. The Future’s Built In: RadiantOne can integrate attributes and contextual data from across your data silos, enabling a world of fine-grained, context-driven new services—all without making heavy investments in custom code or point solutions.

    You need a better, more cost-effective way to integrate your entire enterprise. With RadiantOne Identity and Context Virtualization, you get the next-generation integration solution—so you can save money, add flexibility, and deliver a richer experience for all of your users.

    Learn more about how Identity and Context Virtualization can supercharge your SharePoint deployment. Or catch us at TEC for a demo of our new SharePoint-powered social media interface.

    Hope to see you there!

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    The Overlooked Step in the Authentication Process: Bring Your Security to the Next Level with Improved Identification

    April 21st, 2010

    Part 1 of 6 on the subjects of authentication and authorization
    By Lisa Grady, Product Marketing

    In hopes of unraveling some of the complexities surrounding identity and access management, I’ll be writing a six-part blog series that digs into the challenges of authentication and authorization and uncovers solutions that may work for your company. To kick things off, let’s take a look at exactly how authentication works.

    You Can’t Check My Credentials Until You Figure Out Who I Am

    Authenticating users in today’s distributed, heterogeneous environments can be a complicated process. Put simply, authentication is the process of verifying the claimed identity of a unique user. This process is made up of two very important steps:

    1. Identification
    2. Credential checking

      3. Authentication Process

    Both components are essential, yet credential checking often receives the bulk of the attention—which is a little like buying the lock before you have the door. Although it’s often overlooked, identification is the unsung hero of authentication.

    Identification is the ability to locate a unique identifier for a user within a distributed system. So when a user logs into a system—say, a portal—the unique identifier for that user must first be located.

    The Challenge: Heterogeneous Data Sources, Overlapping Identities

    Now, if all your identities are stored in a single repository, finding that unique user is a relatively easy process. Unfortunately, this is almost never the case. Typically, you’ve got many user stores to handle all the different constituents—employees, partners, customers, suppliers—in your enterprise. These data sources come in many flavors, from LDAP to SQL, and even web services. Most companies, both large and small, find themselves managing a variety of disparate data stores, without the means to integrate them. This can be especially challenging if your company has gone through mergers or acquisitions.

    So when a user enters a username, it’s no simple matter to return a unique identifier for them. The authenticating application must search through all your diverse data sources, each with its own schemas and protocols, including Microsoft Active Directory, ADAM, Oracle Databases, and many others. And what happens if one identifier is found in multiple sources? Do these multiple identities represent the same user? Or different users? How should applications handle these overlaps?

    The Goal: A Unified Infrastructure

    So how can you solve these identification challenges? End users want a seamless experience where they type in their username and password and get access. And IT professionals want a way to simplify the identification process, even as the identity landscape grows more complex. A unified infrastructure means a better experience for customers, partners, and employees. And an integrated environment  makes it much easier to recognize and validate a user’s identity efficiently.

    We’ll dive deeper into the challenges of identification in my next post, then take a look at how to unify your infrastructure (and yes—it can be done!) in the one after that. So stay tuned for more on this topic—and add us to your RSS feed, so you can follow along.

    How does your organization handle user authentication across disparate data sources? Join the conversation here or contact me at blog@radiantlogic.com.

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    Posted in Authentication, Authorization, Provisioning, Virtual Directory Server | 1 Comment »

    The Catalyst of Change: What the Winds are Blowing In at the Prague Conference

    April 7th, 2010

    By Dieter Schuller, VP of Business Development

    Everyone is gearing up for the Catalyst Conferences, coming up this month in Prague and later this summer in San Diego. Normally, Catalyst Europe is not on our radar, but we’re looking forward to this year’s conference because Michel Prompt, our Founder and CEO, will be speaking there about how context virtualization will change the way we secure identities and integrate data.

    Speaking of change, the Prague conference is centered around the idea of what Burton analyst Bob Blakley calls “the emerging identity architecture.” As he blogged at the beginning of March, “Federation technology, directory virtualization, and contextual access control can be combined to create a technical architecture on top of which this market for identities can emerge.” He finishes with a cliffhanger, promising to: “lay out the roadmap in Prague.”

    The changing Identity and Access Management landscape

    We’re excited to see Catalyst focus on needed shifts in the Identity and Access Management (IAM) infrastructure. We can’t wait to learn more about what Burton’s proposing, and we’re thrilled to see directory virtualization and contextual access control at the center of this emerging architecture, since that’s what we’re all about.

    If you’d like to hear more about how Identity and Context Virtualization is key to an identity infrastructure with the future built in, don’t miss Michel’s session in Prague.

    Come join us, we’d love to discuss the future with you!

    As we forge ahead into undiscovered territory, we know there will be many new opportunities. After all, change is inevitable, and this year, Catalyst promises to deliver.

    If you haven’t signed up yet, use the promo code “INSIDER” during registration, and you’ll get your ticket for only 995 Euros.

    And if you can’t make it to Prague, we’ll also be at Catalyst San Diego. Be sure to stop by our hospitality suite!

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    Webinar: Three Building Blocks for Managing Cloud Applications

    April 2nd, 2010

    By Elle Fredericks, Marketing Communications

    Cloud computing offers companies a world of new business and cost saving opportunities. Growth of this market continues at a rapid pace, with demand for the cloud growing at an annual rate of 40% per year (Market Research Media). But as companies add cloud-based services to their repertoire, many are discovering a slew of new security and identity integration challenges.

    Using identity virtualization and federation to enable the cloud

    In order to address some of these challenges, Radiant Logic teamed with Coreblox and Ping Identity. Our recent webinar features a demo showing how you can use the combination of identity virtualization and federation to successfully leverage information in an enterprise directory, Salesforce, and an internal company portal. Using these tools, we were able to:

    • Automate the provisioning and de-provisioning of users within the cloud, based on membership in an LDAP group.
    • Create a centralized view of internal user and customer information from LDAP, Salesforce, and accounts payable database sources.
    • Provide single sign-on into Salesforce through an internal portal.

    To find out more about the challenges of working in the cloud, check out this article from InfoWorld: http://www.infoworld.com/d/security-central/gartner-seven-cloud-computing-security-risks-853.

    To learn more about how these products can help you in your move toward using cloud applications, view the webinar, demo, or contact us at blog@radiantlogic.com.

    Special thanks to our partners Coreblox and Ping Identity for helping to put this webinar and demo together.

    Thanks for reading!

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    Posted in Federation, Identity Integration, Provisioning, Virtual Directory Server | No Comments »

    The New RadiantOne Suite v5.2 by Radiant Logic

    March 22nd, 2010

    By Lisa Grady, Product Marketing

    The new release of the RadiantOne Suite is officially here!

    The new suite includes Radiant Logic’s Virtual Directory Server Context Edition 5.2 and Identity Correlation and Synchronization Server 5.2. The suite offers an intuitive new interface, along with many utilities that make designing and securing your virtual namespace easier.

    Highlights of the new features:

    • Global ID and Profile Builder: This new tool allows companies to create integrated lists of identities and build profiles from data sources, including applications, directories and databases —all without having to centralize security.
    • Membership Policy Builder for SharePoint: Customers can now assign users to SharePoint roles based on attributes that can be found in their profiles—no matter where those attributes are stored. This enables SharePoint to enforce finer-grained policies, and eliminates the time-consuming task of defining and maintaining static role members.

    Membership & Policy Builder

    • Synchronization Monitoring Console: This web-based console allows you to easily manage and monitor all of your synchronization processes. Check the status of synchronization, including the number of messages processed—all from a single interface!

    Making identity integration easier through identity and context virtualization

    To test drive the RadiantOne Suite v5.2, contact our Sales Department. If you already have RadiantOne 4.6 Suite, talk to your sales representative about updating your current version.

    Please let me know if you have any questions about the new RadiantOne Suite. And I’d loved to hear how you use the new features and functionality—so leave a comment here or drop me a line at blog@radiantlogic.com

    Catch us on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook.

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    Radiant Logic Finds Success at RSA Conference

    March 16th, 2010

    This is my second RSA Conference, and like last year, it was a positive experience. As a member of the Radiant Logic business development team,  I attend a lot of Identity and Access Management (IAM) conferences throughout the year. These specialized, subject-matter focused conferences are a great place for prospecting, lead generation, and expanding brand awareness to a targeted group of IAM specialists. RSA, on the other hand, is a megalith of everything from cryptography and packet-sniffing to log analysis, Governance, Risk and Compliance, and one-time password authentication. So how does a relatively niche data virtualization vendor (with booth location misprinted in the conference directory) come out saying the conference was a success?

    Meeting with enterprise security experts

    RSA’s value has nothing to do with finding new customers and everything to do with reinforcing current relationships. Everybody who is anybody in the security space is presenting, exhibiting, or attending the conference. This affords a great opportunity to connect with strategic technology partners and meet with international integrators, consultants, and distribution channel executives.

    RSA enabled us to:

    • Enjoy face-to-face conversations with our international partners on sensitive projects (don’t worry; we aren’t plotting to overthrow any governments!).
    • Re-connect with past partners and discuss future opportunities to use RadiantOne for identity integration, context management, federation, multi-tenant services, and cloud computing.
    • Touch base with our customers on a more intimate level.

    Highlighting the RadiantOne platform

    As a result of our attendance and effort at RSA, we will receive new inquiries and projects regarding our RadiantOne ICS 5.2 release, but these efforts pale in comparison to the progress we’ve made on existing RadiantOne Proxy and Context Edition relationships and opportunities. RSA gave us the chance to learn about technology we’ve never heard of, reaffirm connections with business partners, and educate existing customers on new releases—all while being served a lamb chop from a Fembot!

    As a growing organization, the right mix of partner advocates, presence, and customer engagement and satisfaction is paramount to achieving our business goals. Although a conference such as RSA isn’t a silver bullet, it gives us an extra channel to exhibit our strengths and connect with those most important to that process. We look forward to many productive RSA shows down the road and appreciate the success we have enjoyed this year.

    Best,

    Joe Hunt

    Radiant Logic, Business Development Team

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