Recent thoughts and media appearances

  • EIC Keynote: The Role of Counselors and Applied Identity

    I’ve been kicking around this notion of counselors for a few years now. The first time I debuted the idea it was at the OpenID Foundation Japan conference in 2019. I have been refining it over time. The refinement continued through keynote season this year. What follows is both a recording of my delivery at EIC 2024 as well as the text. You’ll notice that the two differ… and that is a result of my process. Where I start a talk and what gets on stage tends to differ… but in this case they differ reasonably significantly. Truth be told, I didn’t love this talk, but I got a lot of positive response to the actual delivery… which goes to show that what you, the speaker, things of a talk, and what the audience thinks can be very different! Watch the video here or read the text or both and, regardless, enjoy!

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  • Keynote: The Role of Counselors and Applied Identity

    [I’ve been kicking around this notion of counselors for a few years now. The first time I debuted the idea it was at the OpenID Foundation Japan conference in 2019. I have been refining it over time. The refinement continued through keynote season this year. What follows is both a recording of my delivery at EIC 2024 as well as the text. You’ll notice that the two differ… and that is a result of my process. Where I start a talk and what gets on stage tends to differ… but in this case they differ reasonably significantly. Truth be told, I didn’t love this talk, but I got a lot of positive response to the actual delivery… which goes to show that what you, the speaker, things of a talk, and what the audience thinks can be very different! Watch the video or read the text or both and, regardless, enjoy!

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  • Sitting down with John Tolbert of KuppingerCole

    I had the distinct pleasure of sitting down with John Tolbert over many years. I first got to know John as a client when I was at Burton Group and he was at Boeing. Ever since our first conversations, I have always been a huge fan of the way he approaches complex problems. I had the opportunity to sit down with him at EIC 2024 and it was a blast!

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  • Diving into non-human identity

    Who has access to what? That’s the defining question of identity and access management (IAM). It’s been that way since ye olden days. Delivering the right access to the right people at the right time has been core to the mission of workforce identity. Except…

    … that wasn’t always really true. “What can the database administrator do?” We knew early on that there are enterprise functions that are more closely aligned with job responsibility than a specific person. And because of the proclivities of the systems being managed, multiple people ended up sharing the same highly privileged accounts. And so a raft of technologies from role-based access control to privileged user/account management was created. Problem solved; case closed. Except…

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  • Talking Zero Standing Privilege at Identiverse

    It’s been a whirlwind the last few weeks: first Identiverse in Vegas and then EIC in Berlin. Amidst all the flighing, presenting, meetings, and amazing meals, I sat down with my long time good friend Lance Peterman, newly minted friend Alex Bovee, and Jeff and Jim from the Identity at the Center podcast to talk about zero standing privilege (ZSP.) The IDAC guys have just added a brand new feature… video! So check out the five of us talking about why or why not ZSP makes sense in today’s world!

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