Tag Archives: talks

Upcoming Talks At MobileWeek 2014 In NYC

I’ll be attending MobileWeek 2014 in New York City next Monday, April 13. I’m at the conference all day, so drop by and say hello. Part way through the day I’ll  deliver a 2-minute lightning talk on mobile authentication followed by a panel on enterprise mobile security and scalability.

The lightning talk is at 12:25 pm:

How To Make Mobile Authentication Dead Easy

Are your developers struggling to integrate mobile apps and enterprise data? They shouldn’t be! In just 2 minutes, learn the easiest way to get easy end-to-end security between your mobile apps and the enterprise—all without using a VPN.

It must be easy if I can cover it in only 2 minutes.

The panel starts at 1:10 (which is an odd time to start, so keep an eye on the clock). It includes participants from Hightail, and will be moderated by Geoff Domoracki, who is one of the conference founders:

The Mobile Enterprise: Productivity, Security and Scalability

We hear terms like “mobile enterprise” or “mobile workforce” – but how far are we to creating an enterprise work environment that enables real-time communication beyond geographic boundaries – freeing the employee to work from his phone anywhere in the world? This panel explores the opportunities and challenges around the emergence of a “mobile enterprise” where sitting at a desk in the office is becoming more and more out-dated. How do you share documents – secure data – prove identity – and geo-collaborate in the new mobile enterprise?

Overall it looks to be a good day. New York is a hot bed of mobile development, and I’m looking forward to meeting lots of interesting people.

See you at MobileWeek.

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APIs, Cloud and Identity Tour 2012: Three Cities, Two Talks, Two Panels and a Catalyst

On May 15-16 2012, I will be at the Privacy Identity Innovation (pii2012) conference held at the Bell Harbour International Conference Center in Seattle. I will be participating on a panel moderated by Eve Maler from Forrester, titled Privacy, Zero Trust and the API Economy. It will take place at 2:55pm on Tuesday, May 15th:

The Facebook Connect model is real, it’s powerful, and now it’s everywhere. Large volumes of accurate information about individuals can now flow easily through user-authorized API calls. Zero Trust requires initial perfect distrust between disparate networked systems, but are we encouraging users to add back too much trust, too readily? What are the ways this new model can be used for “good” and “evil”, and how can we mitigate the risks?

On Thursday May 17 at 9am Pacific Time, I will be delivering a webinar on API identity technologies, once again with Eve Maler from Forrester. We are going to talk about the idea of zero trust with APIs, an important stance to adopt as we approach what Eve often calls the coming identity singularity–that is, the time when identity technologies and standards will finally line up with real and immediate need in the industry. Here is the abstract for this webinar:

Identity, Access & Privacy in the New Hybrid Enterprise

Making sense of OAuth, OpenID Connect and UMA

In the new hybrid enterprise, organizations need to manage business functions that flow across their domain boundaries in all directions: partners accessing internal applications; employees using mobile devices; internal developers mashing up Cloud services; internal business owners working with third-party app developers. Integration increasingly happens via APIs and native apps, not browsers. Zero Trust is the new starting point for security and access control and it demands Internet scale and technical simplicity – requirements the go-to Web services solutions of the past decade, like SAML and WS-Trust, struggle to solve. This webinar from Layer 7 Technologies, featuring special guest Eve Maler of Forrester Research, Inc., will:

  • Discuss emerging trends for access control inside the enterprise
  • Provide a blueprint for understanding adoption considerations
You Will Learn

  • Why access control is evolving to support mobile, Cloud and API-based interactions
  • How the new standards (OAuth, OpenID Connect and UMA) compare to technologies like SAML
  • How to implement OAuth and OpenID Connect, based on case study examples
  • Futures around UMA and enterprise-scale API access

You can sign up for this talk at the Layer 7 Technologies web site.

Next week I’m off to Dublin to participate in the TMForum Management World 2012. I wrote earlier about the defense catalyst Layer 7 is participating in that explores the problem of how to manage clouds in the face of developing physical threats. If you are at the show, you must drop by the Forumville section on the show floor and have a look. The project results are very encouraging.

I’m also doing both a presentation and participating on a panel. The presentation title is API Management: What Defense and Service Providers Need to Know. Here is the abstract:

APIs promise to revolutionize the integration of mobile devices, on-premise computing and the cloud. They are the secret sauce that allows developers to bring any systems together quickly and efficiently. Within a few years, every service provider will need a dedicated API group responsible for management, promotion, and even monetization of this important new channel to market. And in the defense arena, where agile integration is an absolute necessity, APIs cannot be overlooked.

In this talk, you will learn:

·      Why APIs are revolutionizing Internet communications
– And making it more secure
·      Why this is an important opportunity for you
·      How you can successfully manage an API program
·      Why developer outreach matters
·      What tools and technologies you must put in place

This talk takes place at the Dublin Conference Centre on Wed May 23 at 11:30am GMT.

Finally, I’m also on a panel organized by my friend Nava Levy from Cvidya. This panel is titled Cloud adoption – resolving the trust vs. uptake paradox: Understanding and addressing customers’ security and data portability concerns to drive uptake.

Here is the panel abstract:

As cloud services continue to grow 5 times faster vs. traditional IT, it seems that also concerns re security and data portability are on the rise. In this session we will explain the roots of this paradox and the opportunities that arise by resolving these trust issues. By examining the different approaches other cloud providers utilize to address these issues, we will see how service providers, by properly understanding and addressing these concerns, can use trust concerns as a competitive advantage against many cloud providers who don’t have the carrier grade trust as one of their core competencies.  We will see that by addressing fraud, security, data portability and governances risks heads on, not only the uptake of cloud services will rise to include mainstream customers and conservative verticals, but also the type of data and processes that will migrate to the cloud will become more critical to the customers

The panel is on Thursday, May 24 at 9:50am GMT.

Upcoming RSA Conference Talk: Hacking’s Gilded Age—How APIs Will Increase Risk and Chaos

I’m going to be speaking about API security at next week’s 2012 RSA conference. I gave this talk the provocative title Hacking’s Gilded Age—How APIs Will Increase Risk and Chaos. It’s scheduled for Friday, March 2, 2012 at 10:10am in room 302.

Here’s the long form of the abstract, which gives a little more detail of what I’m going to cover in the talk than the short abstract that’s online:

This session will explore why APIs (which are largely RESTful services) are fundamentally different than conventional web sites, despite the fact that they share common elements such as the HTTP protocol. Web sites abstract back end applications behind a veneer of HTML that should—if it well designed—constrain capability and thus limit an organization’s security exposure. APIs in contrast are a more explicit interface leading directly into applications. These often self-document their intent, and thus provide a hacker with important clues that may reveal potential attack vectors—from penetration to denial-of-service. Because of this, APIs require a much more sophisticated model for access control, confidentiality around parameters, integrity of transactions, attack detection, throttling, and auditing.

But aside from the technological differences, there are cultural differences in the web development community that considerably increase the risk profile of using APIs. Many API developers have a background in web site development, and fail to understand why APIs demand a more rigorous security model that the web sites they were trained on. In a misguided attempt to promote agility, convenience is often chosen over precaution and rigor. The astonishingly rapid rise of RESTful services over SOAP, OAuth over SAML, API keys over certificates, and SSL (or nothing) over WS-Security is a testament to fast and informal prevailing over complex and standardized.

Nevertheless, it is certainly possible to build secure APIs, and this session will demonstrate specifically how you can spearhead a secure and scalable API strategy. For every bad practice, we will offer an alternative pattern that is simple-but-secure. We will explicitly show how the API community is dangerously extending some web paradigms, such as avoiding general use of SSL or not protecting security tokens, into the API world where the cost of failure is far greater. And finally, we will prescribe a series of directives that will steer developers away from the risky behaviors that are the norm on the conventional web.

I hope you can attend. And if you do, please come up after the talk and say hello.

See you next week in San Francisco.

Gartner AADI 2011 Presentation Video: API Management, Governance & OAuth

I delivered a talk all about API governance at last week’s Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration (AADI) summit in Las Vegas. I was the lunch time entertainment on Wednesday. The session was packed—in fact, a large number of people were turned away because we ran out of place settings. Fortunately, a video of the session is now available, so if you were not able to attend, you can now watch it online.

In this talk I explore how governance is changing in the API world. I even do a live OAuth demonstration using people, instead of computers. Unlike the classic “swim lane” diagrams that only show how OAuth works, this one also teaches you why the protocol operates as it does. (If you want to skip directly to the OAuth component, it begins at around 22 minutes. )

Upcoming Cloud Identity Talk At TMForum Management World

I’ll be delivering a presentation at TMForum Management World on Wednesday, May 25, 2001 in Dublin, Ireland. My talk is the second presentation in the Carrier Grade Cloud: Secure, Robust and Billable session. I’m scheduled to speak between 5pm and 5:30, which makes it a perfect way to end the day before retiring to a fine Irish pub. This talk suffers from the rather prosaic title Implementing Identity and Access Control and Management in the Cloud, but the actual content is great, and I promise to deliver a very entertaining show. This is actually a new talk, and I was fortunate enough to have an opportunity to rehearse  last weekend for the Western Canadian Engineering Students’ Society Team (WESST), who met at Simon Fraser University. Students can be a surprisingly tough crowd, but we all had a good time and I was able to work out some of the bugs in the flow. I’m sure it will play well in Dublin.

I hope you can join me next week at TMForum. We can all sneak out afterward for a pint of the Guinness.

How to Fail with Web Services

I’ve been asked to deliver a keynote presentation at the 8th European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS) 2010, to be held in Aiya Napa, Cyprus this Dec 1-3. My topic is an exploration of the the anti-patterns that often appear in Web services projects.

Here’s the abstract in full:

How to Fail with Web Services

Enterprise computing has finally woken up to the value of Web services. This technology has become a basic foundation of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which despite recent controversy is still very much the architectural approach favored by sectors as diverse as corporate IT, health care, and the military. But despite strong vision, excellent technology, and very good intentions, commercial success with SOA remains rare. Successful SOA starts with success in an actual implementation; for most organizations, this means a small proof-of-concept or a modest suite of Web services applications. This is an important first step, but it is here where most groups stumble. When SOA initiatives fail on their first real implementation, it disillusions participants, erodes the confidence of stakeholders, and even the best-designed architecture will be perceived as just another failed IT initiative. For over six years, Layer 7 has been building real Web services-based architectures for government clients and some of the world’s largest corporations. In this time, we have seen repeated patterns of bad practice, pitfalls, misinterpretations, and gaps in technology. This talk is about what happens when web Services moves out of the lab and into general use. By understanding this, we are better able to meet tomorrow’s challenges, when Web services move into the cloud.

Talk at Upcoming Gartner AADI 2010 in LA: Bridging the Enterprise and the Cloud

I’ll be speaking this Tuesday, Nov 16 at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit in Los Angeles. My talk is during lunch, so if you’re at the conference and hungry, you should definitely come by and see the show. I’ll be exploring the issues architects face when integrating cloud services—including not just SaaS, but also PaaS and IaaS—with on-premise data and applications. I’ll also cover the challenges the enterprise faces when leveraging existing identity and access management systems in the cloud. I’ll even talk about the thinking behind Daryl Plummer’s Cloudstreams idea, which I wrote about last week.

Come by, say hello, and learn not just about the issues with cloud integration, but real solutions that will allow the enterprise to safely and securely integrate this resource into their IT strategy.

 

OMG SOA in Healthcare Conference

I’ll be speaking next week at the Object Management Group’s conference on SOA in Healthcare. It’s next week, June 2-4 at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago.

I’ll be presenting a case study of a deployment we did with the University of Chicago Medical Center. I’ve spoken at a few OMG meetings in the past and they are very good. It kind of feels like a return to my roots. I started my career in a medical imaging research group at the University of British Columbia.

Hope to see you in Chicago.

Upcoming Webinar with David Linthicum

Dave and I are co-presenting a webinar this Thursday, May 27th at 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern. The title is Cloud Control: Reducing the Risk for Cloud Deployments.

It’s going to be great to share the stage with Dave, whose work I have followed for a long time and is truly one of the great thought leaders in the SOA and cloud computing space.

Dave is going to introduce the key issues in cloud governance, and I’m going to present some concrete technological solutions that should be the foundation of your cloud governance program.

I hope you can join us. Register here.