Deloitte warns of dangers of unmanaged login accounts – need to clean them up

In a recently released article on their website titled Unmanaged corporate login accounts are a significant source of risk, Andreas Faruki, Partner and Identity Management Lead for Deloitte Canada states:

“Most companies report that scrubbing old accounts requires a massive, long-term, manual effort, while still leaving 10% to 20% of the problem”

I urge you to read the details here.

Deloitte has done some significant fundamental research and analysis of real world enterprise identity data to verify the scope and nature of this problem. They are way ahead of the game in understanding the real issues and how to deal with them.

The main conclusions are:

• The risks of unmanaged login accounts are real
• These identity management risks affect all industry sectors
• Removing old login accounts is essential to robust identity management

Most importantly, Deloitte has build a service offering to solve this problem for large enterprises. I urge you to get in touch with them to explore it more.

(disclosure: The Deloitte solution uses components that I have had a hand in developing)

If you can’t trust your identity data foundation, you can’t trust your identity systems

Phil Becker, Editor of Digital ID World, and deep thinker on network identity offers some keen insights in his series The Coming Third Wave of Identity ( Parts: 1, 2, 3, 4). In the conclusion Phil points out the distinction between the management and use of identity data:

One of the more difficult things for people to gain clarity about in their understanding of identity management, is the separation of the management of identity data itself, and the actual leveraging and use of that data to accomplish various network application and data focused missions such as access control, provisioning, data protection, policy enforcement, etc.

He highlights the importance of the identity data foundation and the difficulty of getting a set of well managed data (emphasis mine):

..today the emerging identity third wave is producing more and more products that seek to leverage identity for a wide variety of purposes. But to be successful, they must rely on a well-managed network of identity data, and obtaining that is a major task in itself.

It turns out that this first step is the hardest one, as it brings to light all of a company’s processes around on-boarding and off-boarding both employees and contract personnel, along with processes around promotion, internal job changes, transfers within the organization, management changes, acquisition integration, outsourcing, etc.

He then points out that we have deluded ourselves in the past about how the problem will be solved by this or that technology:

It is this part of identity management that was long been thought to be “solved by a good directory”, but which has been seen to be a far more networked problem than that. (Although the rise of Active Directory in many companies promises a reprise of this difficult learning curve for many companies.)

So far, so good but, I have a problem with the following statement:

… resulting product evolution has been finding ways to create a well managed identity data set without radically disrupting and altering existing company processes. It is here that technologies such as identity virtualization, synchronization, delegation of management via workflow, etc. come into play.

Initially, the well managed identity data was used to feed such things (as) web access control..

I have two major challenges to this statement. Let me explain.

One rogue user leads to $400Million Data Leakage

IT security focused publication SC Magazine reports $400 million corporate espionage incident at DuPont. This is a further example of the risk of only one person’s improper access to an enterprise. In this case, data leakage was the issue. It even went beyond the business dollar value and started to take on national security overtones. These are not trivial matters.

There are a number of strategies that a company needs to employ to mitigate this type of event. One of them certainly should be to gain control of the huge number of legacy login accounts floating around in your organization that are currently unmanaged.

There is no excuse for not attending to this as straight forward solutions are available.

GUIDs, CUPIDs, and TRUIDs – making connections

When we talk about matching login accounts to people, groups and systems across multiple silos, we need a reliable mechanism to maintain the connection – a unique identifier. When you are dealing with Enterprise Identity Matching, it is important that you have a unique identifier that will have the appropriate scope to do the job. Using employee number will not do the trick. Let’s look at the details.

What to do when you lose your keys? – change the locks!

If you have ever lost your keys, it is a real pain. Most people think it is prudent to change the locks, rather than take the risk that someone might have found them and take advantage of you. Most likely the keys are in the cushions of a couch or found by some harmless, trusting soul. However, why take a chance. Change the locks and sleep better.

Organizations have been losing track of keys (login credentials or login accounts) to their most important computer systems for decades and as I showed in my last post, for larger organizations, this is amounting to about 100K keys where they cannot answer the simple question: who controls this key? Mostly these misplaced keys are in safe hands but, in many cases, they are controlled by an ex-employee, consultant, partner, or current employee who has moved into another area and should no longer have that access. Some may use them against you.

Of course each one of these un-accounted-for keys is a potential negative compliance finding but, also, they represent a ticking time bomb for a business reputation disaster – or worse. For example:

Some hard numbers on how bad ID data is out there

Up to now I have thrown out the round number that 20%+ of your login records are likely ‘unmatchable’ using normal techniques. Here is some more detailed data behind that number.

This particular table is a composite and simplification of detailed real-world findings. It is representative of an organization with about 30,000 active employees and considers data for 7 common applications/directories.

This is not a guess or speculation but, resembles what we have found when we do detailed analysis within organizations. Obviously specifics are confidential.

It is my hypothesis that this represents the situation in almost all large organizations. Every organization that we have investigated so far has a problem of this magnitude. You may be the exception but, I would not count on it.

Over the next few days I will dig into some of the details but, for now, here is the chart. Do you find this as shocking as I do?

click here to enlarge

The messiest part of identity management REDUX

I am a regular reader of the informative Network World Identity Management Newsletter by Dave Kearns.

A long time ago, Dave was onto the problem of identity data quality. Back in June 2003 he wrote an excellent post E-provisioning’s dirty little secret subtitled: First rule of e-provisioning is to ‘cleanse’ your data. In it he makes a number of excellent observations and clearly was ahead of the curve on the necessity for data cleansing and matching prior to implementing identity management system. Rather than summarize it here I urge you to take a couple of minutes to read it.

Last fall, Kearns followed up with The messiest part of identity management. Subtitled: Cleaning up before depolying identity managment. He brings this important issue back to the fore which I applaud. He also talks about some very interesting findings of some in-depth analysis by Deloitte Canada – that large enterprises are unable to match 20%+ of their active credentials to a person.

However, I do take issue with a couple of Dave’s points. One minor and one major.

DIDW Panel Underscores Identity Matching Problem

In my day to day efforts to solve enterprise identity matching problems, one of the biggest obstacles is getting people to realize they have a problem. One of the reasons that this issue is little known is that until you actually have to install a large identity management project, you can ignore the issue. Very few organizations have got to that stage. IE. very few organizations have actually implemented large, multi-system identity management solution where legacy credentials are involved.

Once you get to the stage of having to load in legacy credentials, the problem comes front and center. Recently I have been trying to find public examples to prove this point. In this post, I discussed how Frank Ma of Petro Canada urges all to plan on the difficult matching issue before you are too far into the project.

Since that post, I have listened to another panel discussion from Digital Identity World’s, Sept. 2006 conference. One Sept. 12th, 2006 panel was called Questions We Now Know We Should Have Asked: A Customer Panel. The participants were: Bob Blakely, Burton Group, Moderator; Heidi Kujawa, Sony Pictures Entertainment; Mike Ruman, Grant Thornton, LLP; and Ken Lobenstein, Continuum Health Partners. The presentation PDF can be found here and the full audio here.

I urge you to listen to the whole talk as it is always very instructive to hear what people who have actually done a project have to say. This is where the reality vs. theory gets heard.

Here are some highlights of the audio. I have indicated approximate minutes in the audio and have tried my best to transcribe the quotes with a semblance of context. Listen to it yourself to get the full impact.

What is Enterprise Identity Matching

(This is a first pass definition. I will refine this over time and update the definition on this page)

The Problem

Within enterprises, people have multiple access credentials ( mostly user-name and password ). This is particularly true of organizations that have a number of legacy systems, which have been build over the past many years with no concern for the Internet or even working with each other. Each will have a separate credential.

Over time employees will accumulate many different credentials, some which they no longer need, or no longer should have given their current role with the company. Worse yet, when people leave the organizations, often their access remains. This is primarily due to the fact that many are the champion of provisioning new access but, no-one is the champion of de-provisioning.

The result is a large number of active credentials (about 20%) in most organizations are NOT traceable to a person. Simply, they cannot answer the question: “who does this credential belong to”. This fact undermines identity management and compliance activities in most large organizations and is a significant source of risk for organizations and those that they serve … which is about all of us.

The Solution: Enterprise Identity Matching

Enterprise Identity Management is the combination of tools and processes an organization uses to investigate and unambiguously match all their active access credentials to a person, group, or system.

It is my tenet that this problem is pervasive and significant in large organizations. The solution is non-trivial. I also believe that by better understanding the true nature of the problem and using purpose built tools and techniques, this problem can be overcome with a modest investment of time and money. This blog is focused on the exploration of this problem and possible solutions.

Petro Canada says fixing data is harder than implementing IDM itself

Usually anyone who actually has to complete an identity project learns learns two key truths:

1. There legacy identity data is a mess and many of the records are unmatchable.
2. Matching and scrubbing these records is much harder than they originally thought. In the end, it involves a lot of manual, costly, time-consuming effort.

Here is a great example of advice from someone who has lived the problem. From Digital Identity World May 2005 Conference there was a session called the Provisioning Customer Deployment Panel. If you listen to this MP3 and go to about 22 minutes in the podcast when the Q&A starts, you will hear that Frank Ma from Petro Canada says: