I just notched my 8th year working at Ping Identity and I'm happily starting in on the next 8 at Ping. It has been an amazing ride with rare a group of high execution, high integrity, high character, fun loving leaders...and we're really just getting started. The occasion of my 8th full year at Ping - and my 12th full year working in the Identity space - triggered some thinking about where the Identity world is at this moment in time. That thinking lead to some writing of notes. That writing of notes lead to my first blog post in a long time.
And so...
This is a picture of Richard Nixon visiting Cairo Alexandria (hat tip @stavvmc), Egypt in June 1974. We can’t imagine a US president riding in such a motorcade in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 2012 much less Cairo!
The point:
- The world changes in radical ways.
- The nature of threats change in radical ways.
- Approaches to security change in radical ways.
What will never change is the necessity for presidents to travel the world to get the business of the United States done. In current times, the same level of security applied at the White House travels with the president. (Colombian prostitutes notwithstanding).
In the same way presidents travel to get the work of the US done, in 2012, the best companies are making strategic decisions about where to run core business processes. Many have decided that in order to stay competitive and win, core business processes must travel.
A business might run HR at HQ or in Hyderabad. They might build their own ERP, run a traditional off the shelf monster package, or lease ERP compute from a 6 month old cloud vendor. They can patch together open source CRM, buy pure cloud Salesforce.com, or run a hybrid from Microsoft Dynamics. In this age of radical change and radical choice around IT architecture, IT shops are tackling the challenge of how best to apply appropriate levels of security - regardless of where business leaders choose to run core business processes.
Companies large and small, leading edge and mainstream, now recognize that IT security must travel along with their business processes. The broad recognition that a new approach to security is required in the current environment is what is driving the astounding momentum behind Ping’s business . Leading companies are establishing Identity as the cornerstone of their approach to security and we are taking orders left and right to help them get where they want to go.
Why the shift towards Identity as a cornerstone? Because Identity is the only security function that can travel.
Identity can travel because over the past 10 years our industry, always lead (and often dragged) by Ping Identity, has done the heavy lifting to establish rigorous interoperability standards that actually work. Identity standards such as SAML are becoming the bedrock layer of IT security because they allow IT security to match up with what the business requires IT to look like in 2012. Business needs IT to be distributed, business needs IT to be spread across many clouds, business needs IT to be highly interoperable. Business needs IT to be highly secure.
The ubiquitous adoption of standards that provide secure interoperability between and across business boundaries is inevitable. That’s obvious to any astute observer. Ping is leading this next wave of IT security - that’s also becoming increasingly obvious.
This is why after 8 years I am more fired up than ever. We've built a platform, we've built out an amazing team, we've rolled up market visionaries and influencers as loyal customers - and we've barely scratched the surface. Look out. Let's Go!
Comments