A big ole pile of steamin' hot links

Okay, so its actually only two links (I just liked that title), but they're two very illustrative links:

1. Buried in this press release about small businesses and banking is this statement: "Over 70% of the respondents were looking for an identity management platform to safeguard their business' identity and provide electronic access to financial and other key accounts."

What is of note is that this research (clearly commissioned by Oracle and Unisys) is aimed at getting banks to be more responsive to the small to midsize business market (presumably through Oracle and Unisys offerings). The reason that is noteworthy is that it reveals a trend that Phil and I began to discern at this year's RSA conference -- namely, that identity management vendors (BMC and IBM particularly at that time) were waking up to the SMB marketplace.

That vendor awakening is one of the reasons that I've previously argued that the identity ecosystem is in a period of rapid expansion and growth (despite being in a heated acquisition cycle). As vendors reach down into the SMB market, they're responding to a customer need: the need for products that are focused on ease of deployment. And that need (and response) is about to start driving a whole new round of identity technology innovations (see smaller companies like Applied Identity, A10 network, or Identity Engines).

2. I stumbled across this Computerworld article about the three main issues around HIPAA compliance. Therein, the author lists those three issues as identity management, disaster recovery, and smart cards. My nitpick (of course) is that smart cards are an identity management technology. Which is to say that the three main issues surrounding HIPAA compliance are identity management, disaster recovery and identity management.