Posts Tagged ‘Identity and Context Virtualization’

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

Thursday, 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!

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

Sunday, 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!

Webinar: Three Building Blocks for Managing Cloud Applications

Friday, 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!