What Identity And Access Management Can Learn From 'Car Talk'

In the old, pre-Web days, the cool kids who'd later grow up to be computer hackers worked on cars. While listening to the funny and informative radio talk show "Car Talk," I have often thought that hosts Tom and Ray Magliozzi would be computer geeks instead of car guys if born a decade later. Certainly, their rules apply to today.

During one of the last "Car Talk" shows, the hosts were reminiscing about how they used to open up their garages on the weekends and people could come in and use their tools to work on their cars. Tom and Ray started off each session with a series of rules, saying essentially, "You may think you came here to fix stuff. That is actually the third reason you are here. The first thing you are here to do is not hurt yourself. (Lots of ways to do this in a garage full of heavy cars and power tools). The second thing you are here to do is not break anything that's not already broken (curse of the tinkerer). And then the third thing you are here to do is to fix your car."

The distilled wisdom here is instructive to companies embarking on identity and access management (IAM) projects.

Companies typically launch an IAM effort due to:

A) architecture or design initiative for improvement

and/or

B) compliance makes them

The number of products, protocols, and standards in IAM is pretty staggering at first. Large vendors offer dozens of different IAM products. And all of that is before you get to integration. The end result is that enterprises are left staring at a Chinese menu of options, and all they can do is point one that they partially understand.

The enterprise points at something that looks appealing on the Chinese menu of IAM options; in doing so it thinks it is fixing an architecture and/or compliance problem. But now let's go back to the Car Talk guys' rules: Fixing an IAM problem is the third thing they should be doing.

The first thing is do not hurt yourself, specifically your career. Note, I am not advocating that CYA is the right approach -- people should absolutely take a little career risk when the situation calls for it. What I am talking about here is to understand that not all IAM products and projects have the same scope. They can be quite grandiose in scope, and expensive in time, effort, and complexity terms. Your auditor's recommendation likely does not factor this in, and blindly following that checklist -- without considering long run cost and available options -- can result in the career limiting move: championing expensive shelfware.

The second thing is do not break anything that is not already broken. This applies to integration. Your auditor will not be able to address this either; your architects should. Engage them. Make sure that an IAM solution makes sense for what it's trying to solve and that it works with current and future software. This means not only understanding the IAM solution, but further planning for IAM first-mile and last-mile integration.

On the organizational side it means having teams to support the product from architecture, design, development, deployment, and operations. Key to this is realizing that IAM skill sets are not part of most staffing plans, so consulting is guaranteed to play a role (read: cost). Of course, you don't want to rely only on external, so you will need a skills development program so that internal resources can take ownership.

Finally, who is "the owner?" By its nature, IAM impacts apps, data, business processes, security, usability, and compliance. You cannot simply create the right pragmatic approach to those concerns straight from an auditor checklist. Someone must build the IAM vision and plan how to execute it.

And then you can start fixing your IAM problem.

Gunnar Peterson is a Managing Principal at Arctec Group