The 54th Edition of the Identity Jedi Newsletter

Why I’m excited about Oktane

1) I love California. That will always be home, and anytime I get a opportunity to visit I will. Also Strawberry Crepes, Pier 39. You’re welcome.

2) Okta throws great events. They really do. After all , I’ve said it multiple times they are a marketing company that just so happens to work in identity. But I love the thought they put into their events, especially Oktane. So I’m interested to see the topic of conversations that are brought up.

3) A chance to connect with customers,practitioners. Nothing is better than chance to talk and discuss what’s going with identity with people who are actually doing it, day in and day out. I’m very curious to see what the temperature is of customers around the converged platform plays, ITDR, and the future of identity. Sooo many things to discuss!

Should be a great time. So if you’re attending let’s link up! Oh also there’s a party bus..soooo there’s that too.

A new empire rising?

Cisco, Cisco, Cisco..

Over the last two years they’ve purchased 7 companies. Everything from A.I, to SIEM, to security around kubernetes. As we start to embrace the world of A.I the one thing that is needed is data. ( I’ll jump into this in more detail later). If we want to create all-in-one platforms that combine identity and security AND embrace A.I you’re going to need the following things:

1) A data ingestion platform. You need as much as you can get your hands on. But you also need to be able to ingest and manage that data.

2) An ability to process said data and find/predict patterns

3) An ability to then take action on patterns found.

When I look at acquisitions like Oort, Splunk, Lightspin, and Armorblox it’s hard not to start seeing the vision that Cisco is painting. They have products that can ingest massive amounts of data, they have access to large amounts of log data,and they’ve purchased technology that gives them ability to model and search against that data.

That’s a pretty powerful combination.

Now can they blend all those products into one platform. Doubtful. But really, do they need to? They can just focus on making strong integrations between the products, and focusing on combining the support and backend for those products. ( That’s a ton of work right there alone). But as we move back into this world of converged platforms, and all-in-one solutions, one of the biggest things that would hurt is having a confused customer base who can’t get the help they need with a specific product.

I see an opportunity here for Cisco to truly stand out as a leader into this new age of security. They have the size, reputation, and funding to solve huge problems for some of the biggest companies in the world, and in doing so influence they way security solutions could be built. Granted, I’m a visionary, and I like solving hard problems. Time will tell, if Cisco does too.

If they do….we could have an empire building…..again.

A.I and I.A.M

I don’t know about you, but I’m FASCINATED by the developments in A.I. Mostly because it’s near and dear to my heart. Quick story time:

I had the option when I was coming out of college to either enter the workforce or return to school and get my masters studying data science, and getting a scholarship with a certain three-letter organization that people love to make movies about. It was a hard choice, because I really loved the aspects of data science and machine learning. At this time it was a lot more theoretical than it is today, but it was fascinating nonetheless.

But I was tired of being a broke college kid, so I entered the workforce. Capitalism.

Flash forward to today and the onset of generative A.I has taken the world by storm. It’s everywhere.

Literally everywhere.

So it begs the question. When will we see it in IAM products? And what should it look like?

I have thoughts…

I would guess that by Q1 of next year, we’ll see one of the big players in the identity industry release a “real” generative A.I feature. By that I mean, not a “reworked” version of an advanced analytics feature but an actual generative AI feature. What would that be? Glad you asked:

• Role Discovery/Creation

  • This is probably the “easiest” feature to create as many products have already done something like this. Data clustering algorithms gives products a good way to show clusters of like access. Good start. But to improve this, you can add user activity data, and comparison against an existing role structure. This creates a pattern for an algorithm to compare against and generate recommendations with more accuracy.

• LLM Based Search

  • True natural language search and interactions with your IAM system. “Tell me about the riskiest users in my organization.”

    “What user has gone the longest without an access certification”.

Can’t give away all the ideas, I might actually want to build some of these..lol.

What are your thoughts? What you you like to see from an A.I perspective?

It’s time to party!

Oktane 23, the Party Bus Returns!

Our friends from Acsense are back with another party bus, and this time, it’s in San Francisco during Oktane! Of course, I’m always looking out for you Jedi so click the button below to secure your seat on the bus!