Identity First Announces Inaugural Members and Launch of IdentityFirst.org Community to Shape Identity Management and IT Operations in “Cloud First” Organizations
San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) July 02, 2014 -- IdentityFirst.org, the first industry forum focused on best practices for identity management in a world dominated by cloud and mobile technologies, today announced the launch of the new IdentityFirst.org community. The mission of this community is to develop a framework and best practices for IT leaders -- across all industries and working in “Cloud First” organizations -- to create and implement an Identity First approach to securing IT and operations while accelerating productivity. As part of today’s announcement, IdentityFirst.org is also introducing the group’s inaugural members, including Mike D. Kail, VP of IT Operations at Netflix; Mindy Lieberman, VP of IT at Zendesk; and 15 other CIOs and IT leaders who are early founding members.
"While the cloud is changing the way business is done, we have yet to crack the code on how identity is managed,” said Lieberman. “I'm excited to join a community where we can work together to put identity first. Collaborating with other smart IT veterans will lead to the place we all need to go: a simple yet scalable and secure solution for controlling access across a diverse ecosystem."
The lack of secure integration for cloud and legacy applications into corporate identity management processes is costing global enterprises an average of 3.5 million dollars annually (source: http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/sel03027usen/SEL03027USEN.PDF). These risks and associated costs will be averted when organizations embrace an ‘Identity First’ approach, in which identity management is at the forefront of securing data and devices. Founded by Thomas Pedersen, a co-founder of OneLogin, IdentityFirst.org is the only centralized source of community-developed tools, industry resources, events and a private member community to empower member IAM executives and their teams.
“Because all employees in the Identity First organization understand they are responsible for helping keep the organization secure, shadow IT is not a problem,” says Thomas Pedersen. “The Identity First organization not only encourages employees to be good security citizens, it enables them to be so by providing a supportive infrastructure that rewards and ensures policy compliance while taking the obstacles out of identity access and management.”
With a chronic shortage of budget and support facing virtually every company today, membership in the Identity First community fills a need by providing exclusive resources, research and publications to help practitioners improve the impact they can have during a transformation to the cloud. A strong network of IT leaders support each other through original research, interactive webinars, blog discussions, social communities, and corporate events. Identity First invites all interested IT and Identity Management professionals to join the forum by visiting http://www.identityfirst.org.
About Identity First
Identity First is a professional community and an online forum, Identityfirst.org. It is the first industry forum focused on best practices for identity management in a world dominated by cloud and mobile technologies. This growing group of IT practitioners comes from enterprises rapidly adopting new cloud apps and extending on-premises applications to the cloud, but short on resources and expertise to efficiently and securely control application access and manage the identities that touch corporate data. The community is committed to strengthening security and compliance, reducing identity management costs, and increasing employee productivity. Member-driven publications, events and primary research focus on collecting the goals, challenges and best practices that transform an enterprise into an Identity First organization.
Established in April 2014, the founding community of IdentityFirst.org experts includes Thomas Pedersen, CEO of OneLogin; Mike Kail, VP of IT and Operations at Netflix; Mindy Lieberman, VP of IT at Zendesk; and other noted experts. Learn more about membership and the forums by visiting http://www.identityfirst.org.
Theresa Smith, Kickstart Consulting, +1 818-704-8481, [email protected]
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