Cubs, Sox, and Identity Management

I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, not too terribly far from Comiskey Park, meaning I was raised a White Sox fan. My brother and his kid even got their picture on the front of the Sun-Times, taken at the park in 1977, on a day the Sox won and inched into first place. Wrigley Field, on the other hand, might as well have been on Mars, way up there on the North Side.

But something went terribly wrong in our family. Maybe we grew up too close to power lines; maybe it was fluoridated water, I just don’t know. But some members of the family ended up becoming – gasp – Cubs fans.

Well, pinch my can and call me Slappy, that is just so wrong. How did this happen? I mean, I always liked Jack Brickhouse (even saw him open a run of Damn Yankees), but that’s where it ended. How did my blood relatives end up rooting for a team that plays in a crumbling tomb with awful bathroom facilities, a place that’s regularly inhabited by yuppies who don’t even pay attention to the games, preferring to talk on their cell phones and talk about that day about a hundred and fifty years from now when the Flubs finally make it to the Series?

The faithfully flimsy-brained also have their fond memories of Harry Caray mangling Cubs players' names, forgetting that he had previously mangled names for the Sox, and for the Cardinals before that. Of course, I love his restaurants, but I often turned down the sound on the TV and caught the audio off the radio, like I often do with Bears games, rather than listen to him.

One does not follow the Cubs for the sake of watching a winning team. You watch them because it’s become an in thing. These same yuppie boneheads talk about Wrigley like it’s some kind of cathedral. Forget it. While the shirtless drunks are roasting in the bleachers, swilling their Coors Light, the fans in the shade behind first base might be freezing their cans off. Good luck trying to use the johns. And watch out for all that falling concrete. Meanwhile, the uninformed still blame a guy named Steve Bartman, instead of their own lousy fielding, for blowing their last decent chance of getting to the big game.

The Sox, in the meantime, have been to a couple of Series, and have even won one in recent history. They, um, what’s that word … oh yeah, they CONTEND. The Cubs merely exist. You want to blow off an afternoon? Watch the Cubs. Are you serious about baseball? Watch the Sox.

So what’s this got to do with IAM? Plenty.

While I have to stare blankly at people when they tell me they’re Cubs fans, I maintain that same gaping, slack-jawed look for security guys who tell me they don’t have any provisioning or access management at all. You’d think that by now EVERYBODY has something in place. But no. It’s not often, but it still happens that I speak to companies where provisioning is all still manual. This also means, by the way, that their DE-provisioning is all manual as well. Takes them hours or days to suck a terminated user’s rights out of all target systems.

Their access is governed completely by Active Directory groups. Oh yeah, and they have no idea how MANY of those groups they have, nor where they’re used. These places are auditing nightmares. They can’t push a button and instantly figure out all the resources a user has access to, or has EVER had access to. Neither can they look at a resource and figure out which users have access to it. Just like Cubs fans can’t figure out the last time their team went to the Series, because their grandfathers weren’t alive then.

Rooting for the Cubs and/or not having IAM in place represents a fundamental problem, a tear in the time/space continuum, a metaphorical asking for misery. It's 2010, for cyin' out loud.

So hey, are you a Cubs fan? You’re a complete dodo. And are you lacking an IAM platform? You’re a complete … potential customer. See ya soon!