24th Edition of the Identity Jedi Newsletter

Wednesday 2/1/23 - Identity Jedi Newsletter - Subscribe

Hey Jedi welcome to the 24th edition of the Identity Jedi Newsletter. THE MAMBA EDITION 🐍 🐍 

Kobe Bryant was my all-time favorite basketball player. As a basketball fan in Los Angeles, I was spoiled with championships in my youth. Watching the Kobe and Shaq era, then the Kobe and Gasol era, but what I loved most about Kobe was his work ethic and his mindset. Two quick examples

Failure only exists if you don’t learn and keep going, so when you fail, you will study what you learned, make adjustments, and then try again. 🐍 

Jedi we are so close to 200 Subs and with just over a week left in February, let’s bring it home this month!! 🐍 

Announcements and Events and Stuff

Adding a new section to keep track of announcements, events, discounts,and other things happening in the Identity Jedi Universe.

Events

Let’s Get to the Good Stuff!

• Deloitte and Ping

• Strata recipes for passwordless

• Believe the Hype??

• Product Spotlight: Ethopass and Radiant Logic

Deloitte and Ping announce an alliance.

Deloitte & Touche LLP and Ping Identity have partnered to extend the former’s solutions for digital identity and access management and customer onboarding to the latter’s clients. Deloitte also brings its experience in IAM strategy, implementation, and operations. Ping Identity’s IAM solutions align well with Deloitte’s deep knowledge of connected customer journeys and trusted customer experiences. This alliance will help more organizations reduce risk and accelerate time-to-value as they modernize their identity strategies.

Along with single sign-on, and multi-factor authentication technologies, Ping will provide dedicated sales training, certifications, product roadmap updates, and marketing resources to Deloitte so it can help clients secure access to applications across all IT environments.

Strata recipes for passwordless

Strata Identity has introduced new recipes to make it easier for companies to deploy passwordless authentication to any application without rewriting their code. The new recipes support passwordless and biometric FIDO2-compliant vendors, including Hypr and Yubico.

Believe the Hype?

Gartner Hype Cycle for 2022 has a simple message. Zero trust is here to stay, and one of the frontrunners for making that happen is Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR). I’m not one for putting much faith in Gartner reports, but I can’t deny their research capability. With Zero trust becoming a growing priority on CISO’s list the XDR and ITDR markets should both see growth over the coming years.

Product Spotlight: Ethopass

In the last week, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know one of the founders of an up-and-coming authentication company EthoPass. Putting it very simply, Ethopass is looking to disrupt the authentication genre by truly delivering a secure way to get rid of passwords. I know, I know, everyone says that but not only is this company taking an innovative approach, but they also believe in solving the problem. You would think every company does, but they don’t.

One of the things I admire about CEO Bert Robertson is his true passion for problem-solving and finding new ways to solve hard technical challenges. I can tell from our conversations that solving problems drives him, and I love to see that in any company.

At a high level, Ethopass uses cryptographic keys paired with an identity and a device to handle authentication. They call that a Cryptext. When you setup your cryptext you give it a passphrase. This is yours and yours alone. Upon successful authentication, the keys are rotated. So no getting access to old keys and reusing them. The connection of keys→passphrase→user→device ensures that it’s you that is authenticating.

There are more details behind it, and I encourage you to check it out; they’ve got a great docs page that breaks down the architecture and product. What I like the most about the company is that they are leaning into modern security design. Yes, I know everyone talks about Zero Trust, but they are genuinely building for that environment, so much so that John Kindervag is one of their advisors, and it’s hard to get more Zero Trust than that guy.

I’m excited to see what traction Ethopass can make in the industry. I like their technical approach and how they solve the problem. Time will tell if they can get customer support behind it. If Zero Trust Architecture is an initiative in your organization, look at Ethopass and tell them Identity Jedi sent you.

Product Spotlight: RaidantLogic

Last newsletter, I wrote about RadiantLogic (RL) and its acquisition of Brainwave. Since then, I’ve enjoyed talking with the wonderful folks at RL to hear about the acquisitions, how they see the market, and where they fit.

First, I’ll start by saying that RL is one of the few companies that most people have never heard of but use daily and don’t know. They specialized in the virtual directory space helping companies consolidate and synchronize their identity data. If you’re a company with lots of M&A activity, a widely dispersed set of identity silos, or have data all over the place, you’re likely installing RL to help you make sense of all that. ( If you don’t, well, you might want to give them a call, just saying)

I’ve often called RL the swiss army knife of identity. Its flexibility allows you to gather identity data from any source, but it’s always been that, just data. Don’t get me wrong, that data is wonderful when paired with other identity products. Need a true authoritative source for your IGA or identity-rich store for making policy decisions? RL makes it happen. But now, with this recent acquisition, that data is being unlocked and unleashed within identity. The first step is visualization and providing a simple interface to interact with the identity data you currently have, but that’s just the start for RL. Expect big things from them over the coming months as they build an identity fabric.

The Last Word

One of the many things I’m enjoying about my current time is connecting with different people in the identity industry. Creators and problem solvers are coming together to push innovation into the industry, and that's always a good thing. This will be a pivotal year in the world of identity as we start to shape the future of identity for the next decade. I, for one, can’t wait to see what we accomplish together.

Until next week

Be Good to each other, Be Kind to each other, Love each other

-Identity Jedi

The JEDI COUNCIL

Identity 3.0 -What comes next?

With the increasing sophistication of cyberattacks, identity management has never been more critical for organizations. CISO's must constantly evolve their strategies to stay ahead of the curve and protect their data. As Zero Trust implementations move to the top of the list for CISO's this also means the next evolution of identity moves up as well.

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