Well, my friends, it is time for me to say goodbye. It’s been a wonderful 5 years at Sun. As many probably suspected, I will not be joining the Oracle Identity team.
These past five years have been the best professional experiences in my life. I had a blast working with the Java Enterprise System team and Sun’s systems management team, but nothing beats my experience working with the most talented Identity Management team in the world. Oracle is inheriting THE BEST Identity products available and I wish them luck on their strategy and direction.
Although I’m very happy that this process has finally come to a close, I am sad to see Sun fading away. I believe the environment that Sun fostered was a once in a lifetime opportunity and I appreciate the experience and have tremendous gratitude for all that it offered me.
Since I host my own blog now, I will continue to blog here about everything identity. Also, If you want to keep in touch, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.
On the customer front — Express Scripts has deployed Sun’s Identity Management Portfolio to implement a centralized identity management solution that automates provisioning for more than 100 systems based on an employee’s job function or operational role. The solution has created a centralized identity directory that maps multiple corporate identities on disparate systems that are each associated with a single employee.
I’m happy to announce that Sun Role Manager 5 and Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition 7 are now shipping!
Sun Role Manager 5.0 is the latest release of Sun’s Enterprise Role Management and Access Governance solution. In this release, Sun is extending it’s leadership in the market by driving innovation that will allow companies to move beyond answering the simple question of “who has access to what?,” and make available the information necessary to intelligently govern the definition, assignment, and enforcement of access within an organization.
Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition 7.0 allows companies to grow faster and easier. The new release focuses on two key areas – improving performance and lowering total cost of ownership. This release boasts a 3x performance improvement over the previous version of the product. In addition, this release provides hardware optimization with up to 60% improvement in authentications and modifications. This allows customers to accelerate their applications without changing a line of code.
If you would like a recap of what’s new, check out our press release and updated Role Manager and Directory Server EE product pages below.
1) Read Sun Role Manager 5 / Directory Server 7 Press Release
2) Visit the Sun Role Manager Product Page
3) Visit the Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition Product Page
Also, you can watch a recap of our launch webinar by just clicking on the video below.
Arrrr, me mateys!
I’m going to stand on my soap box for a few minutes to share my take on the ongoing dialogue around RBAC versus ABAC. The debate over which one is better seems to be as heated as the debate over which side of a black and white cookie tastes better (Seinfeld – Black & White Cookie Episode).
I’m constantly asked by customers about which approach I prefer. Analysts seem to enjoy this conversation as well. In fact, Kuppinger-Cole did a nice Q&A on the debate earlier this week and does a great job outlining the issues. Critics of the RBAC model argue that RBAC is static and believe that taking an RBAC-only approach will lead to an excessive number of roles. They argue that policy decisions will need to leverage Roles plus attributes embedded within your application infrastructure.
Honestly, I think the debate here is somewhat self-created by framing it in terms of RBAC versus ABAC rather than simply acknowledging that a good policy engine needs to support both roles and dynamic attributes. It is very rare to come across customers that are able to contain all attributes within a role. I have yet to see a real-world organization with a clean RBAC implementation. Arguing for purely RBAC is a nirvana that casts a blind eye to the grey areas of the application infrastructure world.
The issue of RBAC v. ABAC is less a decision about choosing one over the other and more a decision around where one draws the line when defining roles. Todays organizations need to define a clear line between what attributes should be part of a role and what should remain application specific. The balance between how you define roles versus attributes is very use case driven and contextual to each customers environment. This boundry is often based more on business context, IT budget, perceived value of abstracting identity from apps, and a gazillion other factors that could influence what you should do.
From the perspective of entitlement enforcement, the basic jist is that any system that is going to work for a customer needs to support both ABAC and RBAC. Policy enforcement decisions need to take in to consideration role definitions and sometimes they also need to incorporate dynamic attributes from applications. As we refine entitlement enforcement in OpenSSO (our Beta was made available in September 2009) we are looking at this from both perspectives and expecting real implementations to require a hybrid solution that is dynamic and can take in to consideration both roles and attributes. Our solution consumes roles, allows applications to push attributes to OpenSSO for policy evaluation, and allows OpenSSO to pull attributes for policy evaluation. In fact, OpenSSO also supports policy referrals or partial policy referrals to help make an “accept” or “deny” decision.
Thus, my solution is to stop arguing about RBAC versus ABAC and change the name to ARRRRRRRRR-BAC (use the best pirate voice you can muster). Thus, like the black and white cookie, we can all live together again in harmony.
Below is a great webcast put on by Nick Wooler and Neil Gandhi from the Sun Identity team. They discuss all the great new things in Role Manager 5 and Directory Server Enterprise Edition 7. I’m always struck by the hypnotic power of Wooler’s voice. I’m convinced he has a bright future in Books-on-Tape. Check it out!
Nice video by resident slacker / sales engineer Paul Walker on how the Sun Identity Management suite can complement Sun’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). The demo shows how Sun can provide the whole stack from the operating system, smartcards, SunRay thin client device, desktop delivery mechanism and Identity Management (IdM) to offer a complete and secure VDI solution. The products used in this demo include the following (in no particular order) . . .
* Sun OpenSSO Enteprise
* Sun Identity Manager
* Sun Directory Server Enterprise Edition
* SunRay Server
* Sun Secure Global Desktop
* Sun VirtualBox
* Sun VDI
* OpenSolaris 2008.11
On the customer front — 
Arrrr, me mateys!
Critics of the RBAC model argue that RBAC is static and believe that taking an RBAC-only approach will lead to an excessive number of roles. They argue that policy decisions will need to leverage Roles plus attributes embedded within your application infrastructure.
As we refine entitlement enforcement in OpenSSO (our Beta was made available in September 2009) we are looking at this from both perspectives and expecting real implementations to require a hybrid solution that is dynamic and can take in to consideration both roles and attributes. Our solution consumes roles, allows applications to push attributes to OpenSSO for policy evaluation, and allows OpenSSO to pull attributes for policy evaluation. In fact, OpenSSO also supports policy referrals or partial policy referrals to help make an “accept” or “deny” decision.
