About Forrester
Forrester Research, Inc. is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology.

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.
Future Look: The Identity And Access Management Playbook
This report outlines the future look of Forrester's solution for security and risk (S&R) executives working on building an identity and access management strategy for the extended enterprise. We...

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...

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...
Traditional Methods Start To Sag, While Mobile-Fueled Methods Surge
The strong authentication landscape has undergone tremendous churn in recent years as new mobile-fueled technologies have come online and as RSA, the premier vendor of hardware one-time password...
Road Map: The Identity And Access Management Playbook
This report outlines Forrester's solution to help security and risk (S&R) leaders develop their road map of IAM processes using Forrester's TechRadar™ methodology. The extended enterprise...

Personal Identity Management
Customer intelligence (CI) professionals face increasing pressure to give consumers greater control over the data that organizations collect about them. Forrester has published a report predicting...
How To Protect Your Email Data
In facing security woes such as the Epsilon breach, email marketing professionals have received a wake-up call: Security failures can cost a lot — not just a lot of money but also goodwill with...
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...
Six Vendors That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
In Forrester's 15-criteria evaluation of cloud identity and access management (IAM) vendors, we identified the six most significant solution providers in this category — Covisint, Lighthouse...

We're looking for secure access solutions for a web interface that will enable some sort of strong authentication but doesn't use a two-factor password token. We're thinking of solutions that allow a...
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...

The challenges of consumer-facing identity management, access management, and authentication differ in ways subtle and dramatic from those of the employee-facing variety. In fact, several vendors in...
Assess The Usability, Deployability, And Security Of Customers' Login Processes
Forrester clients often face a hybrid challenge with customer-facing websites: optimizing both security and usability. The tightest security can be a usability disaster, and the most user-friendly...
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...
A Review Of Budgets, Spending Intentions, Technology Adoption, And Key Trends
To help Forrester clients with their identity and access management (IAM) strategy for 2011, Forrester predicted four significant trends. So how'd we do? We got two right and two half right. Heading...

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...
We are interested in understanding more about biometric signatures. What is your view of these technologies?
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...
The Six Vendors That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
In Forrester's 16-criteria evaluation of risk-based authentication vendors, we identified the six significant vendors in this category — CA Technologies, Entrust, iovation, RSA, Symantec, and...
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?
How do retailer websites handle login expiration? Is it session-based, login-persisted, 30-day cookie, and so on? What is the norm or best practice?
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...

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...