John Fontana has crossed the floor, moving from the critics box to the stage.
Many people will remember John's articles at Network World, where he served as one of the most talented and informed journalists in the world writing about network infrastructure for as long as I can remember.
While it is sad to lose him in his role as journalist, I really look forward to what he will do at his new digs: Ping.
I know his ability to explain identity and its issues and technology in words people can actually understand will benefit the whole identity ecosystem. Kudos to Andre Durand and Ping for having the wisdom to bring him over.
Meanwhile, there's exciting news in this post from the new John:
If I could say it better than my former Network World colleague Ellen Messmer I would, but I can’t so I’m just going to link to her story on Gartner’s survey that shows identity management projects rank first in the top five priorities for IT's security spending.
The results of the survey come from interviews with IT professionals at 308 companies.
But let me highlight two paragraphs from Ellen's story:
“Identity management appears to be taking the lead as a top priority as businesses look to deploy some of the more advanced federated identity technologies both within the enterprise for single sign-on and as a way to potentially extend identity-based access control into cloud-computing environments.”
And this one:
“But in terms of firewalls as a priority, [Gartner] notes that there's a movement to install next-generation firewalls.”
On that last point, check this link to From Firewall to IdentityWall.
[John is on Twitter where he also puts together a Tweet list]
