a good thing!
Keynote Panel Recap -- The Future of Identity: Standards & Cooperation (Part 2)
Welcome to Part 2 of the Keynote Panel recap. Last week we highlighted the discussion on user experience and the evolution of the sign-on ceremony. Today we're looking at the spirit of cooperation among the identerati, and how companies attending CIS grapple with competing interests. For more color, watch the 30 minute video here.
Ron sets up the scene nicely: "Yesterday you talked about the spirit of cooperation and the need to fight a common enemy. My feeling as I was sitting there was, yeah, cumbaya, everyone is going to cooperate, but at the end of the day a lot of people here are rivals. They may have a common goal of keeping everybody safe, but they have the individual need to be a business. How do you come together to resolve those big problems while not letting all that politics get in the way?
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend?... It's crazy. I have this list where every few weeks we have to do a check in [with Microsoft] because there are 30 different areas where we're working together on common identity and security standards... But at the end of the day, the hacker is our common problem. I have to worry as much about the user logging in with Microsoft Explorer or Apple Safari as I do with Chrome. Vice versa is true for our competition so I think our interests are extremely well aligned." - Eric Sachs
"It's not just a common enemy, it's a common customer. How many people here have at least two of the vendors represented by the panel represented as customers?... When those big customers you really want to work with come to you and say 'This needs to work with this competitive product,' then you're motivated." - Pamela Dingle
"The steel thread through here is definitely standards. Let's all agree on the standards and let's all agree on the patterns, methods, frameworks and best practice. All of those things can be common knowledge. The implementation of that is where we should differentiate." - Andre Durand
"The one grey area is in the ceremony experience. Have you ever seen video of the "smarter every day" guy driving round the backwards bicycle? We don't want to create the backwards bicycle through product differentiation." - Bob Blakley
Ron: The idea of standards and a platform and building businesses on top of that is a tried and true practice as you know. How far along are we in that vision, and what work still needs to be done to get there?
"I think it's been the last 8-9 years worth of effort that have accelerated. We're darn close to solving a lot of problems today. They don't automate, they don't necessarily scale the way we want. Maybe we haven't connected the pieces to the identity backplane in the way we need to to get to a complete solution. But certainly most of what we're talking about is certainly achievable with bright people putting it together in the right way." - Andre Durand
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Ping Identity is leading an industry-wide campaign to promote adoption standards across developers and service providers. Ping has been pursuing this mission since the early days of SAML, and continues to build a growing consensus toward standards adoption annually among the Cloud Identity Summit's audience of technologists and CISO's. Ping Identity has helped popularize adoption of some of the highest regarded industry standards, SAML, OIDC and OAuth.
Come back next week for the final part of the series, where we'll talk about the compromised credentials conundrum.