Colin Wallis appointed Executive Director

On behalf of the Directors of Kantara Inc., I am delighted to announce the appointment of Colin Wallis as the organization’s new Executive Director.
Colin has been an active participant in the organization since its inception, as part of his role representing his federal employer and his country on federated identity and identity assurance. Colin currently Vice-Chairs Kantara’s eGovernment work group, and is one of two representatives of the Leadership Council on the Board of Directors. He has also taken a keen strategic interest in the work of other groups – particularly Identity Assurance, User Managed Access, Consent, Identity of Things and Federated Interoperability.
About Colin
Being based in New Zealand adds significant challenges of distance and time, but that hasn’t hindered Colin noticeably. With typical Kiwi pragmatism, he has cultivated an enviable understanding of North American and European identity programs, and a corresponding network of relationships with key stakeholders around the world.
In his new role Colin will relocate from New Zealand, reflecting Kantara’s global membership and the importance of Europe to its assurance system and emergent privacy-enabled suite of tools.
Colin is respected in the ‘identerati’ community for a contribution that is technically deep and geographically global. It includes work in:

  • the OASIS technical committees of Security Services, Trust Elevation, Privacy by Design for Software Engineers & Transformational Government;
  • the New Zealand Chapter of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA);
  • ISO JTC1 SC27 (as New Zealand’s Head of Delegation) where he played a key part in CSA’s successful bid to host New Zealand’s first ever SC27 meeting next year.

In the United States Identity Ecosystem Steering Group (IDESG), he is the stakeholder delegate for interoperability at Management Council/Board level, and currently Chairs the International Co-ordination Committee.