Earl Perkins

Hello again, and apologies for taking so long between posts. It can be fun to be released from the strict structural rules of research writing and roam, so I should be writing more of these posts, not less.

I was looking forward to doing some alliterative but also (I hope) meaningful observations about IAM, a challenging task but infinitely rewarding for an organization like Gartner that works hard to bring specific meaning to words. I thought I would express a view about identity and access management that might not be immediately obvious unless you step back some from the pipes, pumps and process nature of IAM to see a bigger pictures. Let’s look at it from a hypothetical historical perspective.

In the big scheme of things, IAM performs tasks that are very old, dating back even to the Middle Ages and before. Think of IAM as a person with four ‘personalities’: a soldier, a servant, a spy and a sage. Now what does this mean beyond the supposedly clever use of words that begin with ’s’?

As a soldier in medieval times, IAM established a means of protection for access to the keep, a way to control who came into the keep and who didn’t. A guard at the gate had to ‘identify’ those who wished to enter, and either grant or deny their access. One could have considered a soldier an “access manager”, when they were performing guard duties not off in battle somewhere.

As a servant, IAM also established a means of administering access. If new people never before seen needed access to the keep, the IAM servant ‘updated the access scrolls’ for those who were and were not permitted access. If residents left, the servant had to close up their homes and remove them from the access scrolls. If the prince was promoted to king, that had to be noted as well, since kings might be able to use the ‘other’ gate into the keep to avoid the peasant traffic in the main gate.

As a spy, IAM would provide a means to watch carefully the coming and going of residents, note suspicious patterns and report them. They also had to provide the scrolls for resident populations to the tax collector (kind of like a regulator for compliance, eh?), and otherwise provide careful oversight of the populations that lived within the keep. They might even spy on neighboring keeps to determine who had and had not visited their own.

Finally, IAM might have been a sage as well, providing analysis and insight into the information about who came and who went, assessing patterns of behavior, recommending which scrolls of access be combined for collective wisdom about the flow of humanity and goods into the keep. A sage would have reported to the king based on what they had discovered, which could raise or lower taxes, expand the gate or restrict access, and provide an overall view of what was happening regarding the identity of those at the keep.

IAM isn’t a new idea– it just has a different way today of being a soldier, a servant, a spy and/or a sage.