Who are you?

Who am I? That's certainly a valid question for the author of an identity blog.

I've spent the past 26 years as a journalist working for newspapers and tech trade publications.  In 2010, I left the tech magazine world after 11 years at Network World magazine having covered Microsoft, Google, IBM and other giants. I joined a vendor (Ping Identity) and assumed a job that gave me latitude to write about the identity industry via various social media channels, blogs and freelanced articles.

Now I am consolidating some of that effort under this blog title (and keeping my day job).

I came to technology in the mid-1990s, lured away from a daily newspaper grind by the shiny newness of the maturing Internet and an expanding dot com bubble that was printing money. I stuck around through the bubble's burst and the subsequent re-birth now known as the cloud. Everything seems more reality based this time around.

One development fostered by the cloud reality is the erosion of computing boundaries. Users, client machines, mobile devices, data stores and applications are no longer just behind corporate firewalls or exclusively under the control of IT. This fact creates implications for identity, access controls, privacy, liability, trust, and many other foundational elements that will eventually help secure everything in a way palatable to companies, organizations and governments.

I hope that here I can explore some of what I see, some of the issues, some of what concerns or confounds you, and track what is going on as corporate computing evolves and your identity becomes the ticket to getting what you want, when you want it and from wherever it lives on the global network.