Worried about Orphaned Accounts, Cost Cutting or M&A Integration?

I received a great email from John Haggard today, former co-founder of Vasco, and a 20 year veteran of the SSO industry. [Disclosure: John is a Ping Identity adviser]. His experience was too good to not share.

I lived through the 80's as a vendor when things got very tough. The security market grew, not diminished. When hard times hit, and companies are downsized, there are a lot of disgruntled employees, and that's a security risk, especially if automation of de-provisioning isn't in place. I think that will hold true this time as well. When companies go into survival mode, the one thing they are not worried about is anything having to do with "improving." Companies have a completely different mindset and things become a whole different playing field.

In the case of Ping, layoffs in organizations will trigger the de-provisioning issues. The FI consolidations will really hit the issues facing consumers - gluing/mapping together existing accounts. What really hit home for SKK was ACF2 required 1 admin per 800 users. RACF from IBM was 1 admin per 100 users (independently verified). When hiring freezes hit along with layoffs, the remaining security folks become frantic for administrative elimination.

What really concerns me this time around is the huge amount of numbers of accounts that are left vulnerable as everyone is in general panic. In the 80's, a small single digit percentage of all employee's had electronic identities. Now I'm sure the number is well over 100% if you count the duplicate accounts per person. And this doesn't even account for the exponential factor that shows up in "federated" systems (partners, consumers, etc.). Accountability will be the catch phrase so anything that supports accountability (single auth event and auditing the SSO steps) will be bankable. -- John Haggard