Entries Categorized as 'Uncategorized'
by Earl Perkins | August 31, 2012 | 1 Comment
In a previous blog, I had touched upon the concerns that I had regarding the U.S. efforts at moving toward a consensus on how to secure N. America’s critical infrastructure, particularly in the energy and utilities markets. I believe the point of that blog was that many people were beating the warning drums, but fewer [...]
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by Earl Perkins | June 27, 2012 | 1 Comment
I REALLY shouldn’t have to write this piece. There are some things in life that you just learn to do that is built upon the ruin of those who came before you. George Santanya once said “those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it”. Out of all of the wisdom passed [...]
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by Earl Perkins | April 20, 2012 | 4 Comments
Alright, that’s enough! I cannot pick up a news feed or peruse a blog about operational technology (OT) or industrial control security (e.g. securing the electric power grid, water, transportation, intelligent health care systems, etc.) without reading yet another story about how life as we know it will end any day now once mysterious governments [...]
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by Earl Perkins | January 20, 2012 | Comments Off
Part of my research coverage at Gartner (in addition to identity and access management) is in what we refer to as the operational technology security environment. We refer to it as operational technology because most of the systems in question are used in the operations environments of industries and other companies. Some of you may [...]
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by Earl Perkins | November 14, 2011 | Comments Off
As I’m writing this, I’m somewhere over New Mexico on my way to Gartner’s annual Identity & Access Management Summit, this year in San Diego, California. This is our sixth annual summit in the USA, and I have been privileged to participate in 4 of them since returning to Gartner. What can I say to [...]
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by Earl Perkins | July 21, 2011 | Comments Off
Well, here we are. Identity and access management as a discipline has been here in various guises for decades now, starting from early and simple administration of passwords to the present day of access management, identity administration, and an assortment of technologies that supposedly help enterprises (and citizens/consumers/partners/fill-in-the-blank) to have a consistent experience with managing [...]
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by Earl Perkins | March 24, 2011 | 1 Comment
When organizations are deep into an identity and access management initiative, it is difficult to stay focused on the fundamentals of why you started such an effort in the first place. IAM can be a lot of things to a lot of people. Some of those things can be relatively simple and the solution to it [...]
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by Earl Perkins | February 25, 2011 | 1 Comment
Let me introduce to everyone a great colleague of mine, Andrew Walls. Among other topics he covers, he is our resident Active Directory specialist. He has kindly consented to contribute to the blog– I know you will like it. Earl Perkins ————————————————————————————- By Andrew Walls Active Directory is everywhere. This is both a testimonial to [...]
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by Earl Perkins | February 11, 2011 | Comments Off
If you’ve been following some of our recent Gartner summits or research (as well as earlier blogs) you may have noticed a theme that has been expressed around “intelligence”, namely identity and access intelligence (IAI). At first glance, you may look at this and say “So what? This is just another name for printing up [...]
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by Earl Perkins | January 27, 2011 | 1 Comment
An interesting thing begins to happen when you’re assigned the job of researching and analyzing identity and access management. If you aren’t careful, you can begin to lose sight of just why IAM is actually being done, and more importantly, for whom? I’ve always had this uncomfortable feeling that as an analyst, as vendors, and [...]
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