Friday, September 19, 2008

Do I have an alter ego?

A few days ago I received an e-mail from Courion Corporation: “Register Today: Sept Webinars Now Posted”. … and reading the content, I jumped.


Yes, one of the webinar title was just like the name of this blog: “Roles in Action”.

Of course I will not claim ‘firstborn’ rights. Very often in marketing you can create a catchword using a simple buzzword generator. For example, within my company we recently named a webcast: “Role Management: unlock the complete value of Identity Management, take full control over Compliance”. Not very original, is it?

Anyway, I am looking forward to this webinar. I hope that Courion speaker, Chris Sullivan, will agree with my blog subtitle: “Roles can’t be built in a day”.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Greg,
So i agree with you about a couple of things:
1) "Roles can't be built in a day", but effective enterprise
roles can be built very quickly.
2) Marketing people borrow heavily from each other -- I didn't name the Weimar,
but it's a decent name. We've reach a level of maturity in the technology
and a level or readiness in most enterprises, that role based access
management and compliance is practical, cost effective, and increasingly
common place. The webinar will focus on pragmatic approaches to achieving this.
-Chris

Greg said...

Yes Chris, I agree with you: roles can be built quickly (much better if a role engineering tool is available), but the biggest problem is then Role Management over time.

From my point of view, Roles can be very dynamic: not just an “aggregation of permissions” but a complex implementation of business policies in order to support a good GRC solution.
Roles and RBAC for several customers today is largely a theoretical exercise, because of the difficulty in making roles actually work within the enterprise. This is due to the fact that Role Management systems are usually separate, and often overlap, with other IAM technologies. It is not trivial to make them work together.