Fellow Analyst

Dave Kearns

We're sorry, but this person is no longer with KuppingerCole.

Latest publications

Blog
Authentication: Multi-Factor, Adaptive and Continuous
August 02, 2016
In the 35 years we’ve had personal computers, tablets and smartphones, authentication has meant a username and password (or Personal Identification Number, PIN) for most people. Yet other methods, and other schemes for using those methods, have been available for at least the past 30…
Blog
Adaptive authentication explained
February 09, 2016
To understand what this article is about it’s important that we have an agreement on what we mean when we use the term “adaptive authentication”. It isn’t a difficult concept, but it’s best if we’re all on the same page, so to speak. First, the basics:…
Blog
Who will become the Google, Facebook or Apple of Life Management Platforms?
June 09, 2015
A Life Management Platform (LMP) allows individuals to access all relevant information from their daily life and manage its lifecycle, in particular data that is sensitive and typically paper-bound today, like bank account information, insurance information, health information, or the key…
Webinar Recording
Borderless Identity: Managing Identity in a Complex World
April 30, 2015
Security and the Internet of Everything and Everyone from Industrial Control Systems, through wearable tech, to “smart” devices for home, office and car there is an explosion of “things” being added to the network. But not just things. Our corporate nets are adding partners and their…
Webinar Recording
External IAM & Your CRM - A Winning Combination
April 22, 2015
Identity and Access Management (IAM) projects have the notorious reputation of being complex, time-consuming and expensive. Fresh thinking and new approaches are now changing how IAM solutions are being deployed so that you can enable revenue generating services faster than ever. One of…
Blog
The Right BYOx Strategy
February 03, 2015
For the past few years BYOD – Bring Your Own Device – has been a hot topic, often leading to shouting matches between IT and users who want to use their own mobile devices to access corporate assets. Lately, it’s been a more generic “BYO” (Bring Your Own) them…
Blog
New Newsletter Season to come: KC Analysts' View
February 04, 2014
It’s a new year, and there are some new changes coming to KuppingerCole, especially in the material that will come into your inbox. First, some background. After the past year or so we’ve been growing by leaps and bounds with new offices in Europe and the Asia-Pacific area as well as new…
Blog
No phishing allowed!
January 07, 2014
Happy New Year everyone! We’ve just come through what’s probably the biggest gift giving month of the year – most of you, I’m sure, unwrapped more than one present. So let me ask a couple of questions. If there was a pretty package, with no tag identifying the giver – would you open it?…
Blog
2013 – The End of Innocence?
December 17, 2013
Many people have begun thinking of 2013 as the Year That Changed Everything, at least in the area of privacy. From the Snowden leaks thru the many iterations of Facebook’s privacy policy, from the implications of the Internet of Things through Google’s troubles with the EU’s various Data…
Blog
Safer, stronger authentication
December 03, 2013
In my last post (“ Dogged Determination ”) I briefly mentioned the FIDO alliance (Fast Identity Online) with the promise to take a closer look at the emerging internet password-replacing-authentication system this time. So I will. But first, an aside. It’s quite possible that the…
Blog
Dogged Determination
November 19, 2013
Some colleagues and I got into a short discussion about the FIDO alliance last week. That’s the Fast Identity Online Alliance, which was formed in July 2012 with the aim of addressing the lack of interoperability among strong authentication devices. They also wish to do something about the…
Webinar Recording
Moving Access Governance to the Next Level: Beyond Check-box Compliance
November 19, 2013
KuppingerCole Webinar recording
Blog
BYOI Revisited
November 05, 2013
Some time ago, in the wake of Wired journalist Mat Honan’s story of his account compromise (“ How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking ”), I wrote about  BYOI – Bring Your Own Identity – and how “In the enterprise, there’s even less reason to support today’s BYOI.” Some…
Blog
Getting the security you need
October 22, 2013
Lately I’ve been writing a lot about how you should be improving your authentication and authorization. I’ve been haranguing you to get Risk-Based Access Control (RiskBAC) sooner rather than later. There has been some push back. It’s a truism in IT and security that “technology is easy,…
Blog
Apple finally gets something right
October 08, 2013
Apple’s new iPhone (the 5S model) is equipped with the Touch ID fingerprint reader. Its release just a couple of weeks ago has generated more discussion (and bloviating) about biometrics, fingerprints in particular, than all other fingerprint systems together. Not only that, but it’s…
Webinar Recording
Authorization as a Calculated Risk
September 26, 2013
KuppingerCole Webinar recording
Blog
A recipe for PII
September 24, 2013
PII, Personally Identifiable Information (also phrased as Personal Identity Information) is at the heart of identity security and privacy. Yet, like almost all terms in the Identity sphere, it suffers from multiple overlapping definitions leading to misunderstandings, heated discussions and…
Blog
I ♥ Biometrics
September 10, 2013
If you’ve followed my writings for very long, you know I’m a strong believer in biometric authentication. (See, for example, this Network World column from over a dozen years ago) Why? Well, for one reason, unlike a password or a hardware token, you can’t misplace or lose a biometric…
Blog
Eliminating passwords? We’re NEARly there!
August 27, 2013
I subscribe to a clipping service which delivers pointers to web documents to my inbox for items I’m interested in (described by keywords). Just last week, it pulled in a document about “The Changing role of the Access Control credential.” Well, access control is one of my favorite topics,…
Blog
Take strong authentication into your own hands
August 13, 2013
It was just a couple of months ago that trend-watcher The Next Web announced that Google Chrome had overtaken Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as the Web’s most used browser, a position that IE had held since, well, way back in the last century. So it’s unfortunate that just last week it…
Blog
Definitely for attribution
July 30, 2013
We had a lively webinar last week on “The Future of Authentication and Authorization”. If you missed, you can watch the replay . Essentially, what I was talking about was context aware Risk Based Access Control (RiskBAC). The  day after the webinar, I got involved in a very lively…
Webinar Recording
The Future of Authentication and Authorization
July 23, 2013
KuppingerCole Webinar recording
Blog
Passwords: Identity’s last mile
July 16, 2013
At last week’s fourth annual Cloud Identity Summit (founded and curated by Ping Identity) people were still buzzing about the hornets’ nest we had stirred up a year earlier at the third summit when we baldly proclaimed “SAML is dead”. SAML, the Security Assertion Markup Language, is…
Blog
Do you need an Identity Officer?
July 02, 2013
I recently saw a query from a major international consumer goods company headquartered in Europe asking “…we have a Privacy Officer, but we are also looking into the possibility for an Identity Officer, someone who is knowledgeable about SSO, identity and so forth. Unfortunately we are…