Readibots: The New Frontier

Star Trek is Cool.

 I don’t think it’ll shock many of you to know that I’m a Star Trek fan. Love the franchise, lots of favorite episodes and over a drink I’d be happy to debate which of the Star Trek movies or series is the best (or worst). You’re probably thinking what does Star Trek have to do with Identity – well, follow along with me. 

In a vast Star Trek universe of cool future technology, there’s a lot of standouts. Warp speed makes the whole show possible. Time travel shows up in so many ways (another long rant avoided here about shows and time travel – might need several drinks for that one), you’ve got photon torpedoes (cool name), phasers, cloaking devices… I could go on. But in the understated-but-still-super-cool-when-you-think-of-it category is the universal interface, LCARS (Library Computer Access/Retrieval System for you non-Trekies),

 The LCARS Experience

 Imagine a single way to interface with… well, just about anything. It’s on their hand-held devices, you fly the ship with it, your science officer uses it to examine the latest alien gizmo. Even the captain’s office has read-outs using the same basic interface. One way to connect to all of your critical systems, get the critical info you need, and do what needs doing.

I feel like modern computing is about as far away from LCARS as the combustion engine is from warp drive. We’re not close. Every week we get a new application with a new interface, all our tools look and feel different, all our logs look different, it’s a mess. Technologies that do the same or similar jobs are configured in radically different ways using different systems and different rules. Azure vs AWS is a great example of two powerful technologies that are used for similar tasks but are configured in radically different ways. It takes experts to do it well (or at all), and there aren’t enough experts around.

Now try and give those tools to someone less familiar with them or someone new to the field. It’s not good.

The Pre-Star Trek Challenge

What we really need is a single way to interface with your critical systems. Maybe someone clever or knowledgeable has to do some work to put it together – I’m sure there’s more than an engineer or two in Starfleet who does the work of making LCARS actually do the things it’s supposed to – but ultimately a clean way to oversee your software and make it do the things you need would be a powerful tool.

Now, even if there was such a thing, making something look cool isn’t really enough to make the business adopt it. It needs more.

It would need to connect to all of the back-end systems you need. That’s a given. Apparently, LCARS has that, since Starfleet uses it for everything, so our version would need that too.

 When you did something with the application, the event should be logged for compliance and security. You’d be able to just do your job, and when folks needed to know what was done and when and by whom, it would all be there in black and white. This means you can give it to folks who aren’t experts and be confident you can figure out what they did, and you have backup for your auditors so they can see too.

You’d need to be able to extend it yourself in case you get a new Vulcan Death Ray or some other cool gadget, you definitely want the Vulcan Death Ray to plug into your current interface. Need something that changes the music in the Turbo Lift? Put it into the interface. Add a new setting on the tricorder? Same interface.

You’d want to be able to share and delegate tasks, too. When I need the science officer to take over the analysis for a bit, I send over the controls. When I’ve written a cool new propulsion trick that will squeeze some more out of the warp core, I’d want our pilots to be able to use it safely without having to know (or mess with) the details. Sometimes they’d need full access so they can make it better, sometimes they just need a “go faster now” button.

Ultimately, we’re a long way off from a universal interface to starships and warp drives, but the folks at Readibots have built a pretty cool universal interface that brings together your Identity systems into a single way to see, interact with, and delegate them.

Readibots: A Real Solution

Readibots Identity Administrator is the tool. It gives you delegated administrative access to your Identity systems. It arrives with an impressive cross-section of different systems it can control, a connector framework you can extend to control even more, and a task engine that allows you to create new tasks and make each task – whether out of the box or homegrown – tasks work exactly how you need it to work.

Identity Administration supports multi-tenant, multi-org, multi-country, multi-… well, you get it. Different regions have different rules on how users are created? No problem. Different tenants have been running things their own way for way too long? Connect and control all of them, no need to clean the mess. It’ll work right through your process. Got some really interesting edge cases you need to build in? No problem, that’s the Readibots way.

As you add systems, the tasks you create can work together to perform even more powerful actions. It’s all logged, delegated, and secured.  It’s not quite as good looking as LCARS, but it’s pretty cool, and its worth taking a look. You auditors are going to love it, your boss is going to love it, your co-workers are gonna love it, and so are you.