Mary Ruddy
Research Director
1 year at Gartner
26 years IT Industry
Mary Ruddy is a Research Director on the GTP Identity and Privacy Strategies team. Read Full Bio
by Mary Ruddy | April 24, 2013 | Submit a Comment
One of the first areas I’m focusing on at Garter is identity federation. SaaS, mobile, social identities and IDaaS are driving new federation challenges. Federation architecture is evolving rapidly to meet these new needs and becoming more central to identity and access management (IAM).
Because of all this change, organizations need to think more broadly about their federation requirements. The federation space is a now huge and there are many perspectives. There is so much happening in the federation space that I’m publishing my initial federation research as a two part series. The first research note, Evaluation Criteria for Federation Technology, is now available to GTP subscribers. Organizations evaluating federation solutions require a complete list of criteria to objectively assess and compare products. This document identifies a forward-looking list of criteria to be considered when adopting an enterprise-grade federation solution.
The second research note in the series will be a companion piece on modern trends in federation and their effect on Identity and Access Management (IAM) architecture. This document will help you find the signal amidst all the noise.
Even two documents can’t begin to cover everything about federation, and it was difficult to determine what to include, but these first two documents will provide some guideposts.
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by Mary Ruddy | February 15, 2013 | 2 Comments
The forces of cloud, mobile devices, social media and electronic data (context) continue to drive new waves of change in the Identity and Access Management (IAM) space. (Gartner calls these forces the Nexus of Forces.) Originally the phrase “federated identity” meant that that partners could use their own logins to access enterprise resources, or an employee could access multiple systems from different without having to login multiple times using different credentials (Single Sign-On.) Specific technologies and standards were developed to support these use cases. Now new challenges and opportunities are driving new types of IAM. For example, some companies are allowing customers to login using social media credentials (Facebook, Gmail, etc.) This is also leveraging “electronic identity credentials and attributes across system domains to support real-time sessions or transactions”, but it uses very different technologies. Does this mean that federation is becoming more important (based on the general functional definition of federation?) Or does this mean that federation is becoming less important because a smaller percentage of transactions use traditional federation tools in a traditional way? Normally one resolves such questions by using the definition preferred by the buyer or end user, but end users tend to talk about reusing logins , and buyers of IAM software typically refer to SSO. In general, neither group talks about identity federation. I’ve been tasked to think about the future of federated identity and I’ve been thrashing back and forth about whether “federation” is becoming more prevalent or going away. One thing is certain, the boundaries on the old narrow definition of federation are blurring and increasingly the word federation doesn’t bring clarity to the discussion.
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by Mary Ruddy | February 11, 2013 | Comments Off
Single Sign-On (federated and enterprise) is part of my initial core coverage area. One of the classic challenges with Single Sign-On (SSO) is that is it single sign-on and not single sign-off. So I was very pleased to see that the OASIS Security Services (SAML) TC has recently approved and published the SAML V2.0 Asynchronous Single Logout Profile Extension Version 1.0 Committee Specification 01. This new extension allows “the initiator to indicate that it does not expect to receive a response from the session authority”. This helps UI design in “deployments that want the identity provider to control the user experience during logout.” It is important that we keep chipping away at the challenges of single sign-off.
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by Mary Ruddy | February 5, 2013 | 1 Comment
It has been a wild first few months at Gartner. IAM Summit, was my first time presenting at a Gartner event (Amazon Web Services and Identity; and Identity Bridges: enabling Hybrid Cloud Architectures) as a Gartner employee rather than as a guest. The Summit’s three days went too fast and I wish there had been more time to talk with those who were there. Now that I’m almost settled in, I’m looking forward to blogging here.
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