For this week’s 5-minute interview, I sat down with Derek Small, the Founder and CEO of Nulli Identity Solution Architects, at GraphConnect San Francisco to discuss how they use Neo4j within identity management.Q: How do you guys use Neo4j at Nulli?
Derek: Well, currently we’re using it for development of extended identity access management policies within the ForgeRock product set. We’re looking at using Neo4j to give us a more feature-rich, contextual information, such as: Who are you? How do you relate to the things we’re trying to protect?
Q: Why did you guys choose Neo4j specifically? What made it stand out for you guys?
Derek: You want to get a laugh? It’s easy.
I could understand it as the CEO, and I could understand the query language. And I love just the way to model data. To me, was very intuitive.
Also, we were looking at IoT and the very massive set of devices that we’re trying to protect and relate to. We knew that other products just can’t really extend to that. We’re talking hundreds of millions of pieces of data, so Neo4j fit well for that use case.
Q: What were some of your most interesting results that you’ve seen throughout your whole usage of Neo4j?
Derek: You’re going to laugh at me. I love it because it helped me actually visualize information within our company. I used the data modeling to model our business process and our management responsibilities.
So even though we didn’t turn that internal company model into an active Neo4j database, we actually used it to visualize how we were going to grow our practice on Neo4j and relate it to our identity and access management.
Q: Knowing everything you know now, if you guys restarted with Neo4j, what would you do different?
Derek: We’d power up the flux capacitor, go back just two and a half years and not drop the project. We dropped it for 12 months for other distractions and yet we knew in the back of our minds that this was something we ought to put money and time into.So I feel that we lost 12 months of momentum.
That’s what I’d do differently. I wouldn’t question our decision at the time, and I would jump on it sooner.
Q: Anything else you want to add or say?
Derek: It’s been a great conference. Glad we could be here, and there’s a lot of interesting people and a lot of interesting problems being tackled.
Want to share about your Neo4j project in a future 5-Minute Interview? Drop us a line at content@neotechnology.com
Want to see how an enterprise organization used Neo4j for identity and access management? Click below to read this case study about Telenor’s resource authorization system.
