Posted October 8th, 2008 Yesterday CA announced its acquisition of IDFocus, a small Israeli company. Among other abilities, IDFocus provides a finer-grained segregation of duty (SoD) analysis engine. CA has previously integrated this engine into Identity Manager, their user provisioning tool.
This is an interesting wrinkle in an ever-changing market. CA now possesses a preventive-controls engine with the ability to look further into the security stack of an application. This engine allows customers to make SoD decisions below the role or group level, at the lower ACL/security object levels. Provisioning vendors have until now done this by calling external services provided by Enterprise Application Controls Management (EACM) vendors.
On one hand, CA has partially obviated the need to integrate with an SAP, Oracle, or Approva by integrating the IDFocus capabilities into CA Identity Manager. On the other hand, CA’s move may have made things more confusing for customers. By increasing the number of controls repositories that a customer has to maintain, integration of IDFocus makes compliant provisioning deployments more challenging. What would be really slick is if CA could find a way to work with the EACM vendors to synchronize SOD tests so that a customer could use the same test for both detective and preventive applications.
I was speaking on this very topic in Europe last week. I commented on the various architectures for integrating EACM into user provisioning to provide compliant provisioning services. (For more on this subject, check out Lori’s report on the matter.) CA has now introduced a fourth deployment model in which the provisioning engine owns the entire compliant provisioning event from the request through the SoD test to the provisioning event itself. An interesting alternative. I’ll be curious to see where CA takes this. Continue reading "CA’s Acquisition of IDFocus"...
Posted August 13th, 2008 [Some friends from Approva where in town from Pune, India. They had read my trip report on our company trip to the beach in Dapoli and found it hilarious. They implored me to post it up on tuesday night.]
Day 1 – A Good Start
 After Shamshu (or Uncle as he is known in the office) picked me up at oh-dark-thirty, we headed to the office. There in watching everyone try and get organized, I introduced him to the expression “herding cats.” I knew I was in for a good time when I noticed dried vomit festooned on the side of the bus. Shortly after, Shamshu asked, with a slight malevolent grin, “Do you get the motion sickness?” I do, Shamshu, I do indeed, but I had prepared for such a situation by doping up appropriately.
So off we went, about 2 hours later than we were supposed to. And by off we went I mean to say, we started fighting through traffic in Pune. Both buses stopped a while later to pick up more people. (There were two buses. Hare Krishna, seen above, and The Short Bus, which will be taking a prominent role in a moment.) In the crew that we picked up at the second included Shishir, Kaustubh, and Aniruddha. After much back and forth, it was decided that the drinkers and smokers would take The Short Bus and everyone else would ride with Krishna. So off we went… again.
 Queue Bollywood sound track at earsplitting decibels. After an hour of that I did make out the distinct sound of a beer being opened. Okay, I’m thinking, this is a good old fashion road trip. Kingfisher in hand I sat back and enjoyed the drive out of Pune and into the hills. Stopping at a Tata Power Generation control reservoir I got a good sense of the landscape reminded me of Southern California.
 On the way back to the bus I saw something hanging from the open engine compartment. Shamshu called it lemon chili and it was, supposedly, for good luck. Keep that good luck charm in mind. Continue reading "What happens in Dapoli stays in Dapoli: A Trip Report"...
Posted February 16th, 2008 I’m headed to India in a few hours, off to meet up with everyone in our Pune office. I have to say, I am really looking forward to this trip. I’ve never been to India before and there’s nothing like a two week trip to serve as a very limited crash course. One added bonus on this trip, I’m lucky enough to tag along on our company retreat. Two days on the beach in Dapoli… sounds like fun. Pictures at 11.
Posted February 15th, 2008 My friend Mark MacAuley can always be counted on to stir things up. He’s seen plenty of enterprise deployments and architectures and comes at problems with a combination of Yankee ingenuity and healthy cynicism. Over on Identitystuff, Mark writes about offering Compliance as a service:
The new frontier is CaaS – Compliance as a Service. Fixed cost, consistent automated reporting, a defensible model for implementing and showing transparency.
Although the intent of Compliance is good, in Mark’s estimation Compliance is 100% cost with no positive yield to the bottom line.
The trouble is that Mark refers to Compliance as if it is an IT service that can be delivered like outsourced help desk or security management. Compliance, the Big “C,” cannot be delivered as a service. The Big “C” is the interplay between people, processes, and IT systems to achieve the mission of the business in the context of regulatory and market pressures. It isn’t binary; it isn’t something you have one day and not the next. This dynamic interplay requires continuous measurement and feedback loops to ensure that deviations are corrected and, ideally, prevented.
Compliance is a matter of controls – instituting a variety of controls and then charting the business’ distance in relation to those controls at all times. Let’s take a simple common non-business example. When a cop pulls you over for speeding, you often get asked two questions: Continue reading "Why Compliance Cannot be Delivered as a Service"...
- Did you see that speed limit sign?
- Do you know how fast you were going?
Posted October 17th, 2007 Lori Rowland has posted an examination of the state of market given Oracle’s acquisition of LogicalApps. Her analysis of the impact of this acquisition to us independent controls management companies mirrors some of my thoughts on the matter. There was one thing that caught my eye. Lori writes:
There are obvious benefits to implementing Oracle and SAP’s controls management solutions to manage the respective environments. Who knows SAP SOD policies or sensitive transactions better than SAP, right?
Maybe not. I posit that the audit community (both internal and external auditors) have a better sense for what constitutes an SoD violation in their business context than ERP vendors do. Clearly, the ERP vendors know, from a functional stand-point, what each transaction and function does in their products. This enables them to build the “well, duh” SoD policies such as “flag everyone with SAP_ALL.” The “well, duh” SoD policies are the just the ante to play in the controls monitoring game. The meaningful, high value SoD policies come from the audit community and their years of lessons learned working across multiple industry verticals globally. It has yet to been if the ERP vendors will truly cater to this community’s needs. It is the greater audit community that Approva has sought to serve since day one and we’ll continue to do so. Viva independence!
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