{"id":3180,"date":"2019-06-01T07:49:57","date_gmt":"2019-06-01T07:49:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wapshere.com\/missmiis\/?p=3180"},"modified":"2022-08-21T16:49:41","modified_gmt":"2022-08-21T16:49:41","slug":"sources-of-truth-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wapshere.com\/missmiis\/sources-of-truth-again","title":{"rendered":"Sources of Truth &#8211; again!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve blogged about sources of truth, and specifically what makes a good one, before (in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wapshere.com\/missmiis\/fim-best-practice-data-sources\">2012<\/a> and again in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wapshere.com\/missmiis\/iam-design-series-the-source-of-truth-is-the-place-where-people-care-about-the-data-being-right\">2016<\/a>) but I&#8217;ve recently thought about an important feature of a SoT that I hadn&#8217;t included on my list before.<\/p>\n<p>So to recap, a good source of truth:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>is probably one of a number of sources you&#8217;re using, but preferably the only one for this particular type of data,<\/li>\n<li>is a place where this type of data is well managed because stuff breaks if it isn&#8217;t,<\/li>\n<li>has appropriate processes to correct the data if it&#8217;s wrong,<\/li>\n<li>enforces data quality through selection mechanisms rather than free text.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Today I&#8217;m adding a new one to this list. An essential feature of a source of truth for an IAM solution:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>is a data store I can query at any time for the <em>current state of the data<\/em>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This last one is what makes a service ticketing system a generally poor source of data for identity automation. I was having this conversation with someone recently and he had a good analogy &#8211; it&#8217;s like if the only way you could get your current bank balance was by going back over all your transactions since the last time you checked. Only it&#8217;s worse than that because we&#8217;d also be dealing with free text, and mistakes in the request that got sorted out with a phone call, and access granted on the side because the user knew how to call directly, so it&#8217;s unlikely we could even construct that current state by going through the history.<\/p>\n<p>A ticketing system is fine and essential for all sorts of requestable stuff, but as far as IAM automation is concerned it&#8217;s only good if the end result of the ticket is someone updating the data in the static data source we use for our actual SoT.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve blogged about sources of truth, and specifically what makes a good one, before (in 2012 and again in 2016) but I&#8217;ve recently thought about an important feature of a SoT that I hadn&#8217;t included on my list before. So to recap, a good source of truth: is probably one of a number of sources&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-practice"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pkp1o-Pi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wapshere.com\/missmiis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wapshere.com\/missmiis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wapshere.com\/missmiis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wapshere.com\/missmiis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wapshere.com\/missmiis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3180"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wapshere.com\/missmiis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3298,"href":"https:\/\/www.wapshere.com\/missmiis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3180\/revisions\/3298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wapshere.com\/missmiis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wapshere.com\/missmiis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wapshere.com\/missmiis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}