About Forrester
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Shar serves Marketing Leadership professionals. She is a leading expert on how businesses can leverage interactive marketing channels and technologies to drive sales and deepen customer relationships. During her 12 years with Forrester, Shar has been instrumental in the development of many of the company's interactive marketing program evaluation methodologies, training courses, and marketing planning tools and has also been part of Forrester's sales and consulting organizations.
Shar's research focuses on overall interactive marketing strategies; crafting efficient, effective interactive programs; organizing for interactive marketing; and integrating interactive channels into the rest of the marketing mix. Specific subjects addressed in Shar's research include email marketing, online advertising, search engine marketing, ad serving and targeting, interactive budgeting and forecasts, and interactive marketing organizational models.
Shar returned to Forrester in 2004 after several years away working in marketing consulting. Shar served as research director for marketing research boutique, TideWatch, where she led internal strategy efforts and client strategy projects. Shar was also a consultant with Carlson Marketing Group's Business Strategy Consulting team, developing CRM and email programs for clients including British Airways, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, and Home Depot. Shar began her career at Forrester in 1997 during the early days of the Internet and has written research on customer loyalty, ad networks, and marketing measurement and planning.
A popular speaker, Shar has been seen on stage at ad:tech, MITX, DMA, and the Email Service Provider Coalition events, among others. She is on the board of SEMPO — the search engine marketing professionals organization — and is also widely quoted in the press including such media outlets as BusinessWeek, Fortune, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal and is a frequent guest on CNBC and National Public Radio.
Shar is a graduate of Harvard University.
Portable Identity Gives New Options To Companies, Consumers, And Clouds
Fast-moving cloud and consumer identity trends are driving shifts in how IT professionals control user access and provide personalized service to networked applications. As IT professionals move to...
By 2012, OAuth Will Be The Incumbent Cloud API Security Solution
Enterprises face a tension between the cloud-friendly software environment promoted by the Web, with its easy-to-use REST interface style and proliferation of lightweight services, and the security...
Microsoft announced during last week's RSA conference that it would not be shipping Windows CardSpace 2.0. A lot of design imperatives weighed on that one deliverable: security, privacy,...

From frantic security operations problems to the changing threat landscape, CISOs, senior security leaders, and other IT risk management leaders consistently have trouble keeping up with key trends...

Security professionals increasingly must respond to the needs of business owners exploring web application programming interfaces (APIs) as a new channel for recognizing business value. APIs can...
The Language Of Levels Clarifies The Value Of Assurance
Consumer-facing web applications are beginning to rely on third-party identity providers (IdPs) for user identification, authentication, and attributes delivered at runtime. This reduces costs and...
Andras Cser probed a sore spot in IAM last week with his post, “XACML Is Dead.” It’s a necessary conversation (though I did see a glint in his eye at the Forrester BT Forum after he...
Our employees are being asked to electronically sign documents from outside our organization. We want to educate these employees on various aspects of the e-signature process. One area is...
Executive Overview: The Identity And Access Management Playbook
The rapid adoption of mobile devices and cloud services, together with a multitude of new partnerships and customer-facing applications, has "extended" the identity boundary of today's enterprise....
Protocol gut check. That's how someone recently described some research I've got under way for a report we're calling the "TechRadar™ for Security Pros: Zero Trust Identity...
What is the future of web access management (WAM) technology? What are the advantages and disadvantages of the different WAM products, focusing on the pros and cons of agent-based versus proxy...
Back in July, I wrote about a new RESTful API that cloud providers and provisioning vendors are working on for doing identity provisioning and synching: Simple Cloud Identity Management, or SCIM...
For a new extranet portal, we're looking for the best way to authenticate strongly 5,000 users all around the world. What is the best way at this time? What way is the easiest to manage?
To help security and risk professionals navigate the complex landscape of privacy laws around the world, Forrester created a data privacy heat map that highlights the data protection guidelines and...

To help security and risk professionals navigate the complex landscape of privacy laws around the world, Forrester created a data privacy heat map that highlights the data protection guidelines and...

Stakeholder Needs: The Identity And Access Management Playbook
This report outlines the stakeholder needs of the Identity And Access Management playbook. Forrester has identified lack of IT executive buy-in and attention as a chronic issue in projects related to...
I've blogged and published research before about the emerging Simple Cloud Identity Management (SCIM) standard. The SCIM group has just approved Version 1.0. No, it's not your imagination:...
Two years ago, the OAuth API protection mechanism was a fairly well-kept secret. It actually won an award at the 2009 European Identity Conference for "best new/improved standard," but most people...
Cloud providers and many federated IAM practitioners are excited about OAuth, a new(ish) security technology on the scene. I’ve written about OAuth in Protecting Enterprise APIs With A Light...
It has finally become hip not just to predict the demise of passwords, but to call for their elimination. The recent Wired article makes an eloquent case about the vulnerabilities that even...
Layer 7 And WSO2 Lead This Emerging Field
In Forrester's 15-criteria evaluation of application programming interface (API) management platform vendors, Layer 7 and WSO2 — and their solutions — rose to the top, followed by Intel,...

The rapid adoption of mobile devices and cloud services together with a multitude of new partnerships and customer-facing applications has extended the identity boundary of today’s enterprise....
Many IT security pros are moving toward disruptive new authentication and authorization practices to integrate securely with cloud apps at scale. If you’re considering such a move yourself,...
With The SCIM Specifications, User Provisioning Goes "Zero Trust"
Business owners are jumping on SaaS services to get quicker wins, and CIOs are finding these services attractive for cutting costs as well. Since it's relatively quick and easy to hook up these...