Ian Glazer, Senior Director for Identity at Salesforce, to Keynote Internet2 Global Summit

Ian Glazer, Senior Director for Identity at Salesforce, was recently announced as a keynote speaker at the 2017 Internet2 Global Summit. I spent a few minutes with Ian discussing identity management in higher education and got a sneak peak of his keynote.

Q: What are some of the key identity management challenges facing higher education?
Higher Ed certainly has unique challenges in identity management. They’re challenging because nobody wears one hat. First they were a prospect, then a student and then become researchers, staff or faculty members. IT runs into a multi-affiliation problem when trying to provide access to core systems like the LMS, HR, Financial Aid and campus networks. Schools have to worry about state actors and protecting a student’s personal and academic data, research and financial information while complying with government and educational regulations, all doing this under tight fiscal controls. It’s really a lot to manage.

Q: Has moving to the Cloud changed the approach?
Universities are taking on new approaches to security as more and more processes move to the cloud. Now, entire departments are running in the cloud. Traditional approaches to security were previously about isolation — how to keep information locked up and hard to access. Cloud is not about isolation — cloud turns isolation on its head. The boundaries around your data center and where your data lives is changing with cloud. It is important that institutions ensure their consumption of cloud is consistent with their risk profile.

Q: What are organizations like Salesforce and Internet2 doing to help?
Salesforce is built with security to protect your data and applications. You can also implement your own security scheme to reflect the structure and needs of your organization. Protecting your data is a joint responsibility between you and Salesforce. The Salesforce security features enable you to empower your users to do their jobs safely and efficiently. From secure geographically dispersed data centers to advanced threat detection and mitigation, all of our customers receive access to best of breed infrastructure and network security as part of their service. Identity can be performed through SAML or OAuth, which works well with Shibboleth. Internet2 established InCommon as a way to make connections to common resources easier and more secure. Everyone works together to build trust and through TIER, Internet2’s software suite, it helps campuses manage their local identity needs.

Q: What will attendees learn in your keynote, other than the latest trends in socks?
In short, how to manage all of this in spite of the changing face/fate of identity. You used to have one source for all identities and life was easy. But today you have a handful of sources of student identities, identities from schools you’re collaborating with, and billions of sources of consumer identities, and that’s just the humans—you have APIs, connected devices, and third-party systems to deal with too.

If you were not able to attend the Internet2’s Global Summit, you can watch Ian’s keynote from Tuesday, April 25 below. And don’t forget to check out his socks. #i2summit17