Wednesday 2/8/23 - Identity Jedi Newsletter - Subscribe

Hey Jedi welcome to the 22nd edition of the Identity Jedi Newsletter. Nice little easter egg for the Swifties out there. And before you ask, no I’m not one of them.

We are continuing our streak of growth every month! Here are some quick stats for those who like to nerd out like me.

• 46 New Subscribers 😃 

• 3 Unsubscribes 🥹 

• Net Growth 24% 📈 

We had our biggest month so far regarding new subscribers! Let’s see if we can beat it, all about that hockey stick growth right? Hit the link below to share the newsletter, and of course, get free STUFF!!!

ANNOUNCEMENT

It’s official you all. The Identity Jedi is coming to Identiverse! I told you there was MAJOR things happening around the Identity Jedi Universe right? If you’ve never been to Identiverse, it’s a must-attend for the identity industry. The sessions are informative and free of vendor pitch bullshit. ( The content committee does do a great job of weeding that out). But you also get a chance to catch up with industry experts and realize that for they are nerds just like you and put their socks on one foot at a time. Some are just more snazzy than others ( I’m talking to you Ian). More updates coming soon, hopefully I’ll be able to drop an announcement every week this month, we’ll see 🤞 ( Waiting on my newsletter platform to support skin tone emojjis…) I’ll have discount codes for you soon!

Bridge Builder Mixer

Don’t forget the Bridge Builder Virutal Mixer is tomorrow! Plenty of time to register and attend. This first one will be Unconference style as the whole point is just to connect people and find what we can do to help each other!

Let’s Get to the Good Stuff!

• Radiant Logic joins the Platform Wars

• Microsoft Partner Program hacked

• ZeroTrust is the new hotness

Radiant Logic joins the platform wars.

If you’ve never heard of Radiant Logic before, it’s ok. Most people haven’t. This is a shame because it’s one of the most flexible tools for an identity program to have in its arsenal, and more than likely is being used in your organization without you knowing it. Until this acquisition, they were one of a few virtual directory products on the market. In a nutshell, Radiant Logic’s virtual directory product allowed you to create a true identity directory by combining various data sources and making them one single source. Now add IGA capabilities onto it and they can offer a pretty competitive quick-to-value offering of handling IGA and identity synchronization. It would be interesting to see if they make an SSO play as well, seeing as how they have half the battle with their directory product. Things are getting interesting my friends.

Microsoft hacked…

Microsoft's Cloud Partner Program was infiltrated by a group of malicious actors and they managed to get verified publisher status. This allowed them to distribute malicious applications that were bolstered by a blue badge only ever given to trusted vendors and service providers in the Microsoft ecosystem. The program is inhabited by 400,000-plus companies that sell and support its enterprise products and services, as well as build their own solutions and software around them. Members include managed services providers, independent software vendors, and business app developers.

All in on Zero Trust

This an interesting piece from Venture beat, with some stats from PWC’s latest report. The quote I found most interesting was this:

” Seventy-five percent of security leaders say their cybersecurity systems and tech stacks are too complex and costly to operate.”

I agree that tech stacks have become to bloated and costly to maintain. This is why we see the consolidation plays in the identity industry, but if IT leaders are truly buying in on zero-trust than a bigger play is at hand. Identity is central to any zero-trust strategy, in fact, it’s table stakes. The whole point is to authenticate and authorize actions based on available data dynamically. This means identity and security need to be one, which means those products should be one But we haven’t seen that play out; security products are still focused on thread detection and detection and response. If we are truly going zero-trust, we should start to see some identity companies acquired by traditional security companies. Just food for thought

The Last Word

I’ll end this with some more thoughts on the Zero-Trust topic. It’s fascinating to see statistics that have so many IT leaders talking about kicking off zero-trust initiatives, but it makes me wonder if they truly understand what those initiatives are, and what it takes to accomplish them. Identity and Security products are very much seen as separate entities right now, in fact I don’t see a lot of partnerships or common messaging between them, and to truly make progress on this front, you have to have identity involved, and you also have to have reliable data. Good luck dynamically authenticating every user when you can’t trust the information you are using to authenticate them or authorizing an action when you understand the entitlements used and/or needed to do said action. It really feels like we are just doing a whole lot of marketing fluff, slapping zero-trust on any and every product, and customers are lapping it up and thinking they are doing the right thing. Hopefully I’m wrong…..but I don’t think so.

Until next week.

Be Good to each other, Be Kind to each other, Love each other

-Identity Jedi

The JEDI COUNCIL

What ChatGPT tells me about identity

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