Brain dump - Identity is a core skill

The other day, I was having a chat with my friend, who is also one of my business partners over at Yobah about our days working for another consulting partner. We were both in the Microsoft practice, but with very different technology focuses. (No matter what the sales teams though, it wasn't all 'Next, Next, Finish!).

I was a big fan of SCCM and anything automation within the System Center suite, while he was deep into his collaboration tooling such as Exchange and Skype for business. Outside of the usual rivalry, we came to an interesting realisation, we both had a core skill in Active Directory. This was the same for all the consultants within the practice... it didn't matter whether you were building SharePoint sites, migrating email inboxes or installing PKI infrastructures... we all had to know how AD worked, which components did what and the impact of any changes we would make.

It got me thinking, especially in the new fancy world of Cyber security and zero trust... identity and access is a critical and core capability that keeps everything together. A weak IAM capability will be your downfall.

So, with that in mind, my brain dump for today is to recommend each and everyone of you working in IT to get yourself a base knowledge on how identity works in an enterprise environment. Whether it is using AWSs IAM, Azure Active Directory or OKTA, these are key capabilities that you need to harden, audit and understand.

As the technology landscape evolves, where more and more business systems are hosted as SaaS solutions, an appreciation of technologies like SAML, OAUTH and JWTs will give you the skills to protect your organisations environments, while at the same time making you end users lives easier.