Posted May 13th, 2009
Ian Yip’s take on access management versus entitlement management can be partially summed up with this equation:
Entitlement management is simply fine-grained authorisation + XACML
I have four problems with this.
First, definitions that include a protocol are worrisome as they can overly restrict the definition. For example, if I defined federation as authentication via SAML, people would quickly point out that authentication via WS-Fed was just as viable as a definition. So in terms of an industry conversation, we need to make sure that our terms are not too narrow.
Second, I fear that this definition is a reflection of products in the market today and not a statement on what “entitlement management” is meant to do. Yes, most of today’s products can use XACML. Yes, they facilitate authorization decisions based on a wider context. But who’s to say that these products, and the market as a whole, have reached their final state? Along these lines, I wonder if externalized authorization stores are a required part of an “entitlement management” solution?
Third, there is something missing from the definition – the policy enforcement point. A fine-grained authorization engine provides a policy decision point, but that still leaves the need for an enforcement point. This holds true whether an application has externalized its authorization decisions or not. Continue reading "Nailing Down the Definition of “Entitlement Management”"...
Posted January 7th, 2009
There’s been a bit of recent blogging activity about federated provisioning and SPML. Having worked on both federated provisioning and SPML in a past life, it warms my heart to see this discussion. Jackson, quoting the CIO of Education Testing Services, Daniel Wakeman, restates the observation that SaaS providers are providing when it comes to federated identity management. This “major shortcoming” leaves service subscribers to fend for themselves in managing user lifecycle events like on-boarding and off-boarding. Not acceptable.
That got me thinking – there really ought not to be a concept of federated provisioning. Provisioning an application in the data center must be the same as provisioning an application in the cloud. However, in the course of the conversation between James, Jackson, and Mark, it seemed SaaS applications and in-house applications were different from a provisioning perspective.
SaaS applications may be harder to provision and de-provision than non-SaaS application, but that doesn’t make them fundamentally different animals. The point was made that SaaS apps lack a standards-based provisioning interface, an SPML interface. The fact is the vast majority of applications, SaaS or not, lack a standards-based provisioning interface and this makes dealing with them very much the same.
Now there are two reasons that we don’t hear the same short of clamor about provisioning non-SaaS applications as we do with SaaS applications: Continue reading "Down with federated provisioning"...
- We’ve dealt with it so long that pain isn’t as acute
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