Growing trends such as BYOD will fuel the move to more pervasive use of identity and access management as a service, driven by the need for pervasive access and management and broader security concerns.
Business trends like bring your own device (BYOD) are forcing organizations to safely allow access to all kinds of applications and resources anytime, anywhere, and from any device.
According to research firm MarketsandMarkets, the demand for improved identity and access management (IAM) technology is estimated to grow from more than $5 billion this year to over $10 billion in 2018.
The explosive growth — doubling of the market in five years — will also fuel the move to more pervasive use of identity and access management as a service (IDaaS). The cloud variety of IAM will be driven on by the need for pervasive access and management over other cloud, mobile, and BYOD activities, as well as by the consumerization of IT and broader security concerns.
To explore the why and how of IDaaS, BriefingsDirect recently sat down with Paul Trulove, Vice President of Product Marketing at SailPoint Technologies in Austin, Texas, to explore the changing needs for — and heightened value around — improved IAM.
Monthly Archives: December 2013
Kevin L. Jackson Team to Deliver Business Focused Cloud Computing Training
Today I am announcing my partnership with EITAGlobal to produce and deliver a series of business focused training webinars on cloud computing.
Headquartered in Fremont, California, EITAGlobal is a continuing professional education provider with a difference. Their strategy delivers effective and relevant training to IT professionals via three delivery options – Live Webinars, Recorded Webinars and In-person Seminars.
Cloud and Mobile Security Management Gain Momentum
As more business applications move to the cloud, security seems to be top-of-mind for all concerned parties. Also, the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to work trend, along with more smartphones and tablets that require wireless connectivity in the workplace, has increased the level of concern for many IT managers and executives.
Keeping business systems safe and protecting the data that they hold has never been more difficult to achieve, according to the latest market study by Ovum. The typical corporate ICT environment continues to be threatened by security attacks — ranging from opportunistic hackers using pre-built tools through to targeted, well-resourced, state-sponsored cyber activity.
Ovum believes that online attack volumes will continue to rise and no business should consider itself immune — since any type of organization can be targeted by hackers. Even the best-protected government, military and business systems have already been breached, and in 2014 they will to be put under further pressure.
Business Technology Security Trends to Watch in 2014
- More proactive protection is needed to address the cyber security time bomb.
- Security-as-a-service will be the way forward for a growing number of organisations.
- Cloud and mobility will change the way we approach IT security and user protection.
“In 2014, cyber espionage and state-sponsored threats will continue to make headlines, but the concerning underlying trend is that similar technology can and will be used against ordinary businesses,” said Andrew Kellett, principal analyst at Ovum.
Security experts recognize the rise in use of sophisticated malware, and this is driving the need for better and more proactive security. However, organisations will be required to fundamentally shift their approach to security from a mainly static defensive posture to one of taking positive action before or as an attack takes place.
In 2014, enterprise organisations will need to gain positive advantages from security intelligence, Big Data analytics, and the ability to understand threat priorities and the actions needed to sustain the well-being of the organization and its users.
According to Ovum’s assessment, not every organisation has the budget or skilled security resources to meet its current protection requirements, let alone the extended use of cloud-based services and the BYOD-driven use of smartphones and tablets by employees.
Therefore, during 2014, more organizations will be forced to consider the practicalities of out-sourcing the requirement to managed service providers, utilizing their readily available security-as-a-service options.
Ovum believes the need for better security will be driven by ongoing operational demands — including the use of new technology that makes business information more readily available and consequently more vulnerable to cyber-attacks.
“Ovum recommends that organizations should look to gain positive advantages from Big Data, security intelligence and analytics-based approaches to security management,” concludes Kellett. “Meanwhile, mainstream security vendors need to provide a range of products and services that genuinely meet the protection needs of both SMEs and large enterprise clients.”
SYS-CON.tv Interview: A New Way to Deliver Cloud
“Since the acquisition Terremark has been getting closer and closer and tighter with Verizon and we have some joint projects underway. We’re about to set the world on fire,” noted Jim Anthony, VP of Sales Engineering at Verizon Terremark, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, held Nov 4-7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo® 2014 New York, June 10-12, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Everything-as-a-Service Creates Product Catalog Blues | Part 2
In my last post, we learned that services are only like products if you are willing to oversimplify them. And if you oversimplify them, you can miss out on business opportunities.
Services (actions supported by things) differ in several important ways from products (things supported by actions). While product options are generally well defined up front by the manufacturer, customers for services want to mix and match pieces of different services and essentially create their own new service. The definition of the service can easily become fuzzier and fuzzier as you serve more customers. Customers know that customizing a mass-produced product is a challenge, but they think, surely it’s easy to fine-tune a service. It doesn’t come pre-formed in a box, after all.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: Game-Changing Technology
“We announced what we believe is a game-changing technology in storage. We introduced a new product called the Ultrastar He6 and we announced a technology called HelioSeal, which is the process of hermetically sealing helium inside the hard drive,” explained Brendan Collins, VP of Product Marketing at HGST, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, held Nov 4-7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo® 2014 New York, June 10-12, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Cloud Management, Business Continuity & Other 2013 Accomplishments
By Matt Mock, IT Director
It was a very busy year at GreenPages for our internal IT department. With 2013 coming to a close, I wanted to highlight some of the major projects we worked on over the course of the year. The four biggest projects we tackled were using a cloud management solution, improving our business continuity plan, moving our datacenter, and creating and implementing a BYOD policy.
Cloud Management as a Service
GreenPages now offers a Cloud Management as a Service (CMaaS) solution to our clients. We implemented the solution internally late last year, but really started utilizing it as a customer would this year by increasing what was being monitored and managed. We decided to put Exchange under the “Fully Managed” package of CMaaS. Exchange requires a lot of attention and effort. Instead of hiring a full time Exchange admin, we were able to offload that piece with CMaaS as our Managed Services team does all the health checks to make sure any new configuration changes are correct. This resulted in considerable cost savings. Having access to the team 24/7 is a colossal luxury. Before using CMaaS, if an issue popped up at 3 in the morning we would find out about it the next morning. This would require us to try and fix the problem during business hours. I don’t think I need to explain to anyone the hassle of trying to fix an issue with frustrated coworkers who are unable to do their jobs. If an issue arises now in the middle of the night, the problem has already been fixed before anyone shows up to start working. The Managed Services team does research and remediates bugs that come up. This happened to us when we ran into some issues with Apple iOS calendaring. The Managed Services team did the research to determine the cause and went in and fixed the problem. If my team tried to do this it would have taken us 2-3 days of wasted time. Instead, we could be focusing on some of our other strategic projects. In fact, we are holding a webinar on December 19th that will cover strategies and benefits to being the ‘first-to-know,’ and we will also provide a demo of the CMaaS Enterprise Command Center. We also went live with fully automated patching, which requires zero intervention from my team. Furthermore, we leveraged CMaaS to allow us to spin up a fully managed Linux environment. It’s safe to say that if we didn’t implement CMaaS we would not have been able to accomplish all of our strategic goals for this year.
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Business Plan
We also determined that we needed to update our disaster recovery plan to a true robust business continuity plan. A main driver of this was because of our more diverse office model. Not only were more people working remotely as our workforce expanded, but we now have office locations up and down the east coast in Kittery, Boston, Attleboro, New York City, Atlanta, and Tampa. We needed to ensure that we could continue to provide top quality service to our customers if an event were to occur. My team took a careful look at our then current infrastructure set up. After examining our policies and plans, we generated new ones around the optimal outcome we wanted and then adjusted the infrastructure to match. A large part of this included changing providers for our data and voice, which included moving our datacenter.
Datacenter Move
In 2013 we wanted to have more robust datacenter facilities. Ultimately, we were able to get into an extremely redundant and secure datacenter at the Markley Group in Boston that provided us with cost savings. Furthermore, Markley is also a large carrier hotel which gives us additional savings on circuit costs. With this move we’re able to further our capabilities of delivering to our customers 24/7. Another benefit our new datacenter offered was excess office space. That way, if there ever was an event at one of our GreenPages locations we could have a place to send people to work. I recently wrote a post which describes the datacenter move in more details.
BYOD Policy
As 2013 ends, we are finishing our first full year with our BYOD policy. We are taking this time to look back and see where there were any issues with the policies or procedures and adjusting for the next year. Our plan is to ensure that year two is even more streamlined. I answered questions in a recent Q & A explaining our BYOD initiative in more detail.
I’m pretty happy looking back at the work we accomplished in 2013. As with any year, there were bumps along the way and things we didn’t get to that we wanted to. All in all though, we accomplished some very strategic projects that have set us up for success in the future. I think that we will start out 2014 with increased employee satisfaction, increased productivity of our IT department, and of course noticeable cost savings. Here’s to a successful 2014!
Is your IT team the first-to-know when an IT outage happens? Or, do you find out about it from your end users? Is your expert IT staff stretched thin doing first-level incident support? Could they be working on strategic IT projects that generate revenue? Register for our upcoming webinar to learn more!
Transforming IBM to Manage Customer’s Cloud Expectations
Customers are expecting to consume IT as a service and IT vendors, including IBM, are responding.
Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the IBM Software Group’s Analyst Insights conference for the industry analyst community. IBM’s total revenue of about $100B comes from its combined hardware, software and services sales, but the software group contributes a large proportion of its profits. Cloud services require coordination from all IBM divisions, and it was no surprise that IBM focused an inordinate degree of attention at the event to non-software cloud products.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: Software-Defined Everything
“APIs are a layer of integration where you integrate apps to the back end. Those APIs have to be secure, they have to be managed, they have to be monitored, you have to know everything that happens to those APIs and we provide that level of product so people don’t have to worry about it,” explained Roberto Medrano, Executive Vice President at SOA Software, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, held Nov 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo® 2014 New York, June 10-12, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Why cloud and mobile security management is gaining momentum
As more business applications move to the cloud, security seems to be top-of-mind for all concerned parties. Also, the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to work trend, along with more smartphones and tablets that require wireless connectivity in the workplace, has increased the level of concern for many IT managers and executives.
Keeping business systems safe and protecting the data that they hold has never been more difficult to achieve, according to the latest market study by Ovum. The typical corporate ICT environment continues to be threatened by security attacks — ranging from opportunistic hackers using pre-built tools through to targeted, well-resourced, state-sponsored cyber activity.
Ovum believes that online attack volumes will continue to rise and no business should consider itself immune — since any type of organization can be targeted by hackers. Even the best-protected government, military and business systems have already been breached, and in 2014 they will to be …