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"You want to take compliance from an event that you don't look forward to ... turn it into a process," says Ben Newton.

The United States government must process and protect vast amounts of data essential to our country’s welfare. The challenge for government IT organizations is to make this information available when and where it is needed, without risking the security of that data or the government’s networks.

Whether you are dealing with compliance and security in a Federal environment, as a Federal contractor, or simply need to meet stringent internal security requirements, be sure to listen in as we talk with Chris Olson, Technical Director and CTO for Public Sector Sales at BMC Software andBenjamin Newton Software Consulting Manager for Public Sector; Department of Defense and Intelligence Community at BMC Software.

Bios

Chris Olson is Technical Director and CTO for Public Sector Sales at BMC Software. Chris manages the day-to-day technical sales engineering activities for all federal, state and local, and education accounts.

Ben Newton is the technical director for Department of Defense and Intelligence Community Sales at BMC Software. He manages the technical side of the sales cycle for all of BMC’s defense and intelligence community customers.

Questions

1. So, Chris and Ben, you’ve been at this awhile. Have you seen some changes, concerns, or trends that are noteworthy?
2. It sounds like on the government side, besides the sheer numbers of devices concerned being huge—and widely distributed—the compliance process involves a lot of process and detail. It sounds like a massive undertaking, am I right?
3. What’s changed in the last 3 to 5 years that make it more complex to demonstrate readiness and compliance with regulations
4. What is it about automation that they really need to know in order to move forward?
5. What are some of the key steps for creating a culture that integrates security and configuration management to get to the place of compliance? 6. How do you talk about BSM with regards to the challenges relating to continued compliance, to support compliance effectively, and so on?
6. Normally, we’d be asking about what the business benefits are to this of approach ad architecture and thinking about BSM. But, how are the business benefits different when we’re talking about the Federal Government?

 

 

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Whether you refer to it as identity management or access management, it's all about understanding who has rights to access your data. You need an audit trail, the ability to assign roles and responsibilities, and to manage passwords. But, what does identity management have to do with ITIL version 3 and the CMDB? Ken Turbitt, global best practices director at BMC Software explains.

Ken discusses his own personal identity management crisis and what trends brought about the access management update to ITIL version 3. He also recommends the optimal way to auto-discover and populate your CMDB with identity data. This is important to truly understand how this data impacts, and is connected to, the systems and services of your business.

Resources

Bio

Ken Turbitt is a qualified ISEB ITIL manager and Gartner-qualified TCO consultant. He was a founding member of the Institute for the Management of Information Systems (member since 1985) "outsourcing special interest" group, founded a successful independent consultancy, and was an enterprise architect/analyst for Peregrine Systems, assisting sales and business development across EMEA. Ken also managed the Infrastructure Resource Management (IRM) consultancy practice within Fujitsu/ICL on a worldwide basis, where he was recognized as the ICL worldwide authority on Asset Management and related services. Before ICL, Ken was a management consultant with Price Waterhouse Coopers (then Coopers & Lybrand), where he managed their Network Management Center. Currently, Ken is employed by BMC Software working as best practice director, assisting BMC in aligning with the Best Practices for IT services (e.g., ITIL, CobIT, ETom), presenting to clients, partners, and analysts.

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When you hear the word "audit," do you shudder? Have no fear, says Rami Elron, Senior System Architect with the Identity Management business unit at BMC Software and co-author of several books on security. This isn't the IRS. Identity Management audit helps you stay in control of the different identity records that relate to users and is necessary if you want to stay ahead of regulatory compliance requirements. Today, auditing plays a key role in IT management duties.

Did you know that many Identity Management solutions in the marketplace today were designed before regulatory compliance mandates were established?  Rami tells us how this impacts the decisions your organization makes for this area. How can managing and auditing identities address regulatory compliance concerns, why has audit become so important, and what does all of this have to do with Business Service Management (BSM)? Find out, from the guy who wrote the book on it.

Resources

The Black Book on Corporate Security

Bio

Rami Elron is a Senior System Architect at BMC Software and is responsible for designing BMC Software's Identity Management suite, and the solution’s next-generation architecture and features. An industrial engineer, Rami has over 15 years of experience in computing infrastructure and development environments as a developer, project manager, and system architect, and has lectured in academia and at prominent computer industry conferences. Rami has an extensive background in Windows and Java technologies, application development, UI design, identity and security management technologies, system infrastructure, and implementation of frameworks such as MSF. Before joining BMC Software, Rami served as Vice President of Technology for a large system integration firm. Rami was appointed by Microsoft to be a Microsoft Regional Director for operating systems and received several notable awards, including Person of the Year.

Rami is an active member of the OASIS Provisioning Services Technical Committee that created the international SPML standard for provisioning and identity management. Rami co-authored a best selling book on Windows XP and has written numerous articles on Windows, security, and identity management technologies.

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Identity information can be found all over organizations today, says Cindy Sterling, Director at BMC's Identity Management business unit. Why should you care? Well, this labor-intensive and disconnected information leaves most organizations struggling with IdM inefficiencies. Keep it simple and focus on four key areas: Who are all of the users that touch the IT resources, what do they have access to, how did they receive this access, and what is their behavior? Once these questions are answered and you link and visualize the data, your company will realize immediate IT benefits, and can empower end users and business owners.

What makes our approach unique, asks Cindy? Well, we break it down into bite-sized pieces. This modular methodology allows your organization to enter any place in the IdM chain: directory management and visualization, access management, user administration and provisioning, password management, and audit and compliance management. If you're really trying to improve your business services, you need to focus on the linkage between people, process, and technology. Identity management is the glue that binds your infrastructure and service management initiatives ... and a great place to begin your BSM journey.

Bio

Cindy Sterling is a director with BMC Software's Identity Management business unit. Since joining BMC in 1993, Cindy has held several executive positions including director of operations for field marketing for the Americas covering five business units, director of North American technical services for security management solutions, and worldwide director of product marketing and business development for identity management solutions. The flagship product of her business unit is BMC Identity Management Suite, the most successfully deployed solution in the market today, covering Directory Management and Visualization, User Administration and Provisioning, Audit and Compliance Management, Access Management, and Password Management.

Prior to 1993, Cindy held several professional and management positions at American United Life Insurance Company. At AUL, her career activities included automating the company’s data center which included deployment of several BMC Software solutions. Cindy holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics degree from Taylor University.