Earl Perkins

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Smart Grid, Operational Technology, or Industrial Control Security- What do you call it?

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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The 6th Annual Gartner IAM Summit

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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It’s time for an IAM Reality Check

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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IAM: To Control, Observe, and Inform

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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Active Directory Consolidation as a Design Philosophy

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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The Real Meaning of “Intelligence” in IAM

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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Too Many Managers in Enterprise IAM?

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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Identity in 2011: Anything but Dull

by Earl Perkins  |  January 6, 2011  |  Comments Off

I watched throughout December 2010 at all of the “predictions” and “projections” for the coming year, and was somewhat depressed. I am not that good at making predictions, an unwise admission as an analyst. It’s fun as long as no one takes you seriously, otherwise it can be a problem. I am however a lover [...]

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Additional Observations on the Attachmate Acquisition of Novell

by Earl Perkins  |  November 23, 2010  |  3 Comments

As the details of Attachmate’s acquisition of Novell become available, I wanted to add a few more observations to the discussion. First, I’m struck by the level and intensity of interest in the acquisition itself. While Novell has been in the industry for many years (founded in 1979!), its revenues and relative size seem out [...]

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The End of an Era: Attachmate Acquires Novell

by Earl Perkins  |  November 22, 2010  |  3 Comments

I knew that I would have to write this blog at some point in 2010, but I didn’t know when. Attachmate’s acquisition of Novell for $2.2B signals the end to an era. Novell represents one of the original key players in the network operating system and identity management period from the early 1990s until today. In [...]

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