ILM “2” ... coming soon and it’s all about TCO!
By John “JG” Chirapurath, Director, Identity & Access Marketing
JG here, from the identity and access team at Microsoft. As you probably remember, last year at RSA Conference USA, Microsoft announced availability of Identity Lifecycle Manager (ILM) 2007, which joined user provisioning and certificate & smartcard management in a single integrated offering. For far too long, the industry has treated two related functions – identity management & strong authentication – as fundamentally dissimilar things. This despite the fact that customers have stressed that they are not! Both functions are connected by Identity and its related workflows – the act of provisioning a user identity is deeply connected with issuing a certificate or a smartcard to that Identity. ILM 2007 sought to address this very need.
As I look back at last year, all of us here in the Microsoft identity & access group have been pleased and humbled by the reception of the approach and ILM 2007! Customers have repeatedly told us that we have the winning approach from a TCO perspective, and it allows them to maximize their existing investments in infrastructure – be it Microsoft Windows or other heterogeneous systems.
We have also heard repeatedly from customers that their experience with Identity & Access Management is unbalanced – the current state of the art forces IT departments and service desks to bear the biggest burden with respect to Identity & Access. They are forced to integrate a variety of best- of-breed solutions (even today’s suites are loosely coupled point solutions simply marketed as suites) with the right business rules & workflow while ensuring things like user provisioning and de-provisioning, entitlement management, group management, password reset work. On the other hand, people with the knowledge of the “what” – the organization’s line-of-business and functional workers – are forced to sit on the sidelines and wait for IT. They crave meaningful and easy-to-use self service in their familiar desktop applications. Overall, customers are asking us to rebalance the responsibilities of Identity & Access Management in their organizations so they can deal with security and compliance in a cost effective and comprehensive manner.
These concerns are top of mind for us as we think about the next version of ILM – ILM “2”. I am pleased to report that we will announce a public beta shortly. ILM “2” will expand the capabilities of ILM 2007 and to add comprehensive user, group, credential, and policy management functions. Our mantra is TCO & true self service and as we did with ILM 2007, we will shift the state of the art and strive to bring balance to the enterprise.
Signing off from RSA 2008,
John “JG” Chirapurath, Director, Identity & Access Marketing
