Blog by Martin Kuppinger

Blog
IBM & Red Hat – And Now?
by Martin Kuppinger
On October 28 th IBM announced its intention to acquire Red Hat . At $34 Billion, this is the largest software acquisition ever. So why would IBM pay such a large amount of money for Red Hat? Not surprising, there were quite a few negative comments from parts of the Open Source community. However, there is logic behind that intended acquisition. Aside of the potential it holds for some of the strategic fields of IBM such as AI (Artificial Intelligence) and even security (which is amongst the divisions of IBM showing the biggest growth), there is an obvious potential in the field of...
Read More
Blog
IAM for a Microservices World: Securing Agile IT
by Martin Kuppinger
Ten years ago, for the second EIC, we published a report and survey on the intersection of IAM and SOA (in German language). The main finding back then was that most businesses don’t secure their SOA approaches adequately, if at all. Ten years later, we are talking Microservices. Everything is DevOps, a small but growing part of it is DevSecOps. And again, the question is, whether we have appropriate approaches in place to protect a distributed architecture. This question is even more important in an age where deployment models are agile and hybrid. So how to do IAM for this...
Read More
Blog
IAM as Microservices: It’s About Flexibility and Agility
by Martin Kuppinger
Since I’m observing the IAM business, it has been under constant change. However, there is a change on its way that is bigger than many of the innovations we have seen over the past decade. It is IAM adopting the architectural concept of microservices. This will have a massive impact on the way we can do IAM, and it will impact the type of offerings in the market. In a nutshell: microservices can make IAM far more agile and flexible. But let’s start with the Wikipedia definition of Microservices: Microservices is a software development technique—a variant of the...
Read More
Blog
Blockchain for Identity – Myth or Potential?
by Martin Kuppinger
During yesterday’s opening keynote at the EIC (European Identity & Cloud Conference), I brought up (and explained) a slide about the areas where Blockchain technology has the potential of helping solving existing identity problems, either by doing it just better than today or delivering entirely new capabilities. Notably: it was about the potential, not that this will inevitably happen. Not surprisingly – an Opening Keynote should provoke thoughts and discussions – this lead to some discussions in the social media right after. Some found that...
Read More
Blog
Blockchain Identity – Success Factors and Challenges
by Martin Kuppinger
When new things arrive, which are still in the pioneering stage and far from reaching maturity, there is always a lot of discussion. This is even more true for Blockchain Identity, where the massive hype around Blockchains, a long history of clever ideas failing, and a few interesting technical and security challenges come together. During my keynote at this year’s EIC , I addressed the challenges and success factors for Blockchain ID as well. That led to a discussion on Twitter about whether some of these success factors are contradictory. That definitely is...
Read More
Blog
Not a Surprise: German Government Under (Cyber) Attack
by Martin Kuppinger
Yesterday, the reports of the German government having become a victim of a cyber-attack spread the news. According to them, the attack affected the Ministry of Defense and the Department of Foreign Affairs. There is an assumption that the attack had been carried out by APT28, a group of Russian hackers. However, only very few details are available to the public. When reading the news, there are various points that made me raise my eyebrows. These include it has been a group of Russian hackers the attack is under control/isolated the German government network is well secured...
Read More
Blog
Successful IAM Projects Are Not a Rocket Science – if You Do It Right
by Martin Kuppinger
While we still regularly see and hear about IAM (Identity & Access Management) projects that don’t deliver to the expectations or are in trouble, we all see and hear about many projects that ran well. There are some reasons for IAM projects being more complex than many other IT projects, first and foremost the fact that they are cross-system and cross-organization. IAM integrates a variety of source systems such as HR and target systems, from the mainframe to ERP applications, cloud services, directory services, and many others. They also must connect business and IT, with the...
Read More
Blog
Consolidation in Privilege Management Market Continues: Bomgar Acquires Lieberman Software
by Martin Kuppinger
Just two weeks after One Identity has acquired Balabit , the news spread about the next acquisition in this market segment: Bomgar acquires Lieberman Software. Both vendors have been active in this market. While Bomgar entered the market a couple of years ago, having a long history in Remote Control solutions, Lieberman Software is one of the Privilege Management veterans. Looking at their portfolios, there is some functional overlap. However, while the strength of Bomgar comes from Session Management related to their Remote Control features, Lieberman Software is stronger in the...
Read More
Blog
One Identity Acquires Balabit
by Martin Kuppinger
Yesterday, One Identity announced that they have acquired Balabit, a company specialized on Privileged Management, headquartered in Luxembourg but with their main team located in Hungary. One Identity, a Quest Software business, counts amongst the leading vendors in the Identity Management market. Aside of their flagship product One Identity Manager, they deliver a number of other products, including Safeguard as their Privilege Management offering. Balabit, on the other hand, is a pure-play Privilege Management vendor, offering several products with particular strengths around Session...
Read More
Blog
Microsoft Azure Confidential Computing – a Step Forward in Cloud Security
by Martin Kuppinger
A few days ago, Microsoft announced Azure Confidential Computing . As the name implies, the technology is about adding a new layer of protection to cloud services, specifically Microsoft Azure, but also Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 running in other public cloud infrastructures on specific hardware. The foundation for Azure Confidential Computing are so-called TEEs (Trusted Execution Environments). Such environments protect the code running in that environment and data used by the code from other parties’ access. Neither administrators, neither people having direct access to...
Read More
Previous … 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 … Next