Christopher Bongaarts, IAM architect, University of Minnesota, says that if your IAM infrastructure has been lingering in a state of limbo for a long time and has “dark, cobwebbed corners,” you need to come hear what he and co-presenter Kellen Murphy, identity architect & solution engineer, University of Virginia, have to say during their session, “IAM Archaeology,” at the 2023 Internet2 Technology Exchange (TechEX23) in Minneapolis September 18 – 22, 2023.
The duo will be offering relevant insights that can help IAM professionals retire legacy systems and bring their technology infrastructures up to speed. To get a better idea of what will be covered, we asked Christopher about the value of his upcoming educational session and of TechEX23 overall. (Register now.)
1. What do you hope attendees will learn from your session entitled IAM Archaeology?
The most important takeaway from my part of the talk would be to understand and document why things are the way they are, so you can make intelligent decisions about when to keep on doing them that way or try something else. Those of us in the IAM business did not deliberately make things complicated for their own sake; they are that way because higher education is a complex identity environment with lots of what would be edge cases in a simpler environment.
More specifically, attendees will learn from University of Minnesota’s latest attempt to retire a 31-year-old identity system as well as University of Virginia’s journey of replacing their home-built group management solution with Grouper. We will offer practical knowledge on retiring old systems and facilitating future retirements from both organizational and technical perspectives.
2. Why is this an important topic to cover?
So others can avoid (some of) the self-inflicted pain we have been through.