DRAC - Theory

I have heard about this sometime ago. 

DRAC or ...

Denial

Resistance

Acceptance

Comply

theory talks about human nature/response when something new is introduced into one's way of life. 

We see this especially in the consulting industry. 

Why and where?

As system integrators we try and bring new products into an enterprise. While doing so we hear a lot of negative criticism about the new products in many ways. However, the DRAC cycle completely applies. After a while people start to accept it and comply.

Certification/Attestation on an iPad

Some innovations are smart. One of Oracle's partner did something really smarter. 

For those who do not understand what Identity Governance or Certifications or Attestations or Access Reviews, it is a process of ensuring that every individual is verified to check if he/she has the right accesses to the systems according to his job role and also to check and remediate unnecessary/toxic ones.

Oracle has a cool product to help Organizations solve this issue/problem of Certification. Its web based. Now a partner brought this to an iPad. I wouldn't like to talk anymore but let you watch the video. It would be very interesting for you if you already know a little bit about Oracle Identity Analytics. 

Oracle Identity Governance - Assets

If you are in the space of Identity Management and work for Oracle products, you certainly want to visit the Assets page on OTN.

In today's market who else provides intelligence to public just as Oracle does? :-)

Migrating from VMWare to Oracle Virtual Box

There is a good article on how to migrate. But the caveat is the tool eats up all the VMDK files and turns them to VBox files. So please make a copy of the VM before you follow this.

Oracle Identity Governance - R2 is out

The most awaited and iconic release of Oracle Identity Governance Platform solution just happened. Go ahead and start reading about it on the OTN. Use #OracleIDM on twitter to read more about expert views.

Sailpoint IdentityIQ: Revoke a Policy Violation from Certification

If you had Policy Violations recorded in IdentityIQ and have included them in a Certification then normally it would be displayed as below.

You have only two options. Approve or Delegate. A general option of REVOKE is not provided for a policy violation.

However, there is a option to revoke the same if the certifier wishes to. Of course this is not told and not given. But its a simple change :-)

Open the Policy object and you would see something like below in the first line after XML declaration.

 

Notice the certificationActions tag?

Modify the same to look as below shown. 

Once you add the Remediated word to the tag, your certification automatically shows up the revoke button. Here's a screen shot of how it looks.

Hope this helps.

SailPoint Press Releases :: News & Events :: SailPoint Technologies

SailPoint Press Releases :: News & Events :: SailPoint Technologies

SP Identity IQ: Certification not updated to show revocations done

Okay! I am trying to be pretty descriptive here.

Suppose you have created a certification in Sailpoint's Identity IQ.

The Certification Owner has revoked a user and saved the certification. Then the certification header would be something like this.

An email is sent to the administrator to revoke the entitlement/account.
Administrator, being a good employee has done the revocation right away.

A scheduled Account Aggregation, in the next few hours, get kicked off and brings in the new data regarding the revocation.

An Identity refresh scheduled for the same night, updates the entitlements for the users.


Problem:

You still do not notice the update in the Certification header. It still shows a list of items, which were completed, as due.

Solution:
In every Certification configuration there is a parameter named nextRevocationsScantime

This has a default setting which is inherited from a SystemConfiguration setting.

remediationScanInterval set to 86400000 milliseconds

nextRevocationsScantime attribute is created along with remediationsKickedOff="2"

The above attribute is created, once you revoke someone and save the cert.

Later when you remove the entitlements in database and do an account aggregation and identity refresh; it shall not directly reflect in your cert. Once the nextRevocationsScantime is complete and PERFORM MAINTENANCE TASK runs then it scans and completes the process.

Later in the cert you will not see nextRevocationsScantime. Rather you would see this. remediationsCompleted="1" remediationsKickedOff="1"

Hope this helps to few consultants.

Attention Sun IdM Customers - "What's Your "Plan B"?

Attention Sun IdM Customers - "What's Your "Plan B"?

This is what Sailpoint says about SUN Identity Manager, its customers and the solutions they can offer to these customers. Interesting read.

It's always sad to see SUN Technologies dying.

epoch conversion tool

What is epoch time?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time

Short description from Wikipedia:

Unix time, or POSIX time, is a system for describing points in time, defined as the number of seconds elapsed since midnight proleptic Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) of January 1, 1970, not counting leap seconds.

Where do you find with respect to IAM parlance?

I have found that Sailpoint's IdentityIQ uses this convention for all dates. examples are create date, expiration date etc.

So if you want to understand what are the exact dates?

visit http://www.epochconverter.com/

An important tip for Sailpoint implementors - Requests Page

I was recently working on integrating Remedy with Sailpoint's IdentityIQ 5.0. Other than getting a weird error in the log I was unable to trace the root cause. One of my colleague tried having a look and suggested I should see in https://localhost:8080/identityiq/monitor/requests/requests.jsf. I could actually see all the items that are queued up there. Here is a screen shot.

It is suggested to have a look at this page when you are trying to debug something and unable to go ahead from the usual check points.

Bill Gates advice to the Youth

I came across this article on LinkedIN. Its a good read for everyone. Go ahead, read it from here.

Facebook's Sharing feature now on LinkedIn

This is something very good from linkedin. Check out this video; it explains it all. Very good feature.

Match the following: SUN Products get New Names under the Oracle Umbrella

I have read this on Oracle site which was showing the latest names given to all the SUN products. Check it out

Sailpoint's IIQ 5.0

Finally, Sailpoint is coming up with its fully geared up Entitlement management software, Identity IQ 5.0. It is going to be released next week. It boasts of many exciting new features like Provisioning, Access Request Manager integration etc. 

Need to wait and watch how the product would be after this release. One quick doubt (may be too early) I have is, are they trying to bring new Provisioning product along? Then why (as there are  already a lot of products available and deployed)?

I have worked on versions from 2.5 to 4.0

Password Reset Issues

I regularly read Jackson's Blog and today I found a very interesting post which was talking about a particular presentation in the RSA conference. I recommend everyone to read it. One line I thought should be mentioned here from the presenter's website was ...

It has been estimated that the average cost of a password reset involving a help-desk call is $22

So how much are companies bleeding on password reset calls???

How unique is your browser?

I subscribe to Bruce Schneier's Crypto-gram. There was one article on "How unique is your browser?". Read it. 

I have tried it for my browser and the results were as follows.

Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 645,288 tested so far.

Dont forget to read the FAQ section

This is how the Chinese are doing Business

I have come across an interesting article on the SANS news mailer. Give it a read.

My old team at SUN is no more

I learn't that recently on the first week of January, the whole team of SOA/BI was removed. All the resources were let out in RIF. That was so unfortunate to know. I am sure everyone would find wonderful jobs again.

Also I hope Oracle keeps the wonderful suite of IAM products of SUN going.

My experience in Sales

Long time ago, when I was pursuing my masters, as a part of the course I had a to complete a three month internship. I got selected into an organization which was into Networking and Server sales. The three months I spent there were pathetic. I almost forgot those days.

However, I have recently saw a Hindi movie, which depicted the true picture about sales. After watching this I remembered my old experiences.

During the internship, for the first few days I was asked to collect existing Customer feedback on the sales done with them. One day I ended up at an Agricultural Research University in Hyderabad. I met a professor who was in-charge of a Digital Library project. I met her and asked for feeback. She almost started crying. The story unfolded so ...

Our sales guy approached her long back and started explaining her about SUN's initiative in digital library solutions. He recommended her a server which was priced at Rs.5 Lakhs or half a million in Indian currency. She, I assume asked him if it would work with any custom software and he said yes. The Prof. blindly bought it. In the other part of the story, which happened before, someone else approached her regarding a software solutions to Digital Libraries. She gave the contract to them to write a software for the university.

Now on the D-Day they had both the software and the server. They kept the software CD in the CD-ROM of the SUN server and expected something to happen. Oops!!!!! nothing happened because the software was written in .NET. The university realized this and called the software vendor and requested to rewrite it in Java. The guy accepted it for another 2Lakhs, which the university did not have.

So the day I went there I learnt that because of all this fiasco, the Prof got demoted, the solution came to a halt and they have a software and hardware which do not work together. The prof boots up the server and checks yahoo mail once in a week.

After this she tried calling my sales guys many a times, in vain.

This is how sales are ... People are duped 1000% of the times in software. That is the reason why software is selling.

There would be a time when people would certainly get intelligent and then I wonder what these IT sales guys do?

If you want to know the name of the horrible company I worked for ...