Notes from Oktane

It’s been a whirlwind couple of weeks with conferences across the U.S. Last week, I was in SF for Oktane and while I wasn’t able to attend every session, I did pick up some interesting tidbits from conversations and attended their main presentation around CIAM. ( Check the link for all the announcements coming out of Okta last week).

My biggest takeaway: Okta is all in on creating a converged platform. Not a surprise here, as they’ve been touting this for years now, but you start to see the pieces come together. However, it hasn’t been all roses as they’ve been on this journey. I can’t say the IGA and PAM offerings have been a slam dunk thus far. Okta’s biggest challenge is that these areas aren’t as simple as Singe Single ON; you have to be able to handle the complexity of environments and customer requirements. For decades now, customers have been used to building complex workflows and logic to solve these problems. Time will tell.

The other area was clearly AI. I didn’t get a chance to see their Workforce cloud version, but I didn’t attend the CIAM main session and it was on full display. The message to me was clear. Identity practitioners are in a new age of identity. It’s no longer just the responsibility of configuring your solution, it’s also protecting the identities in that solution. Now granted main stage demos are always….shall we say, happy path, and of course, highly scripted. But the vision is there. The ability of Okta AI to recommend configuration changes in response to events seen in the tenant was impressive, and there is room for growth there.

All in all a decent show, and Okta as always shown itself as a true visionary; now, can they execute?

SailPoint

Sigh…this is going to be tough for me to write and probably for some of you to read. As most of you know, I spent a good part of my career as part of the SailPoint Crew, and I still have good friends who work there, and I will always root for them.

That being said. It’s time to show and prove for the crew. They’ve been the unquestioned leader in the IGA space for a decade now, but that market is changing. The “Identity Security” marketing term has started to become a reality, and competition is heating up ( See the announcement from Veza in the good reads section). SailPoint has talked about moving past the IGA space and truly being an identity platform. Their announcement of the SailPoint Atlas Platform is..confusing.

They are announcing something that isn’t new but is different, yet you already have it, and it’s included in the current packaging.

………

Huh?

I hope this is the tipping point to real innovation from the crew. They’ve collected the resources over the years to deliver a world-class identity security platform truly, but they can’t quite get there. For years you could count on SailPoint to deliver. Their word was their bond. I’m not sure that’s the case anymore.

I’ve been wrong before…here’s hoping I’m wrong again.

Identity Mob

If you’ve been following me on LinkedIn for a while you may have noticed a hashtag come across. #IdentityMob.

I’ve talked about this before ( I think) but it was inspired by Chris Hoy as a tag we could use to help out one another in the identity community. I encourage you to follow it on LinkedIn as we look for ways to use our community to help each other. If you come across an open Identity position share it and use the hashtag. If you have a question about identity, “Ask the mob”. Let’s continue building our community, and make sure we got each other’s backs.

Cuz that’s what mob’s do.

#identityMob #mobUp

Allow me to re-introduce myself…

For the past 20 years, I’ve been asking questions and solving problems. I’ve asked hard questions, and I’ve solved hard problems. I’ve pushed boundaries and always looked towards the future. I didn’t just want to solve a customer’s problem today; I wanted to solve their problem tomorrow and the day after that. And I wanted to solve it today.

I fell in love with this tiny big niche of cybersecurity called Identity and access management. This combination of business process, security, and technology. I watched as this field that no one cared about evolved into one everyone was talking about. I saw a shift coming, and I wanted to be a part of driving the next evolution of identity and security.

So I called some friends, we had some discussions, and we decided to get together and build something that would change the way we looked at security.

For the last nine months, that’s what we’ve been doing, and now we are ready to show the world.

Let’s do things a little different

Shared Responsibility

A word from our friends at Acsence

Let’s talk about the Shared Responsibility Model. (SRM) If you’re building architecture for cloud-based applications it’s a term you’re probably all too familiar with, and if not, its definitely something you should. Here’s a blog from our friends over at Acsense that breaks it down.

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