* Identity experts weigh in on the future of cloud computing
I spent a pleasant hour talking with Martin Kuppinger (of Kuppinger Cole + Partner) about “Externalizing Identity into the Cloud: Identity Services in Cloud and Outsourcing Environments” – and we even had a surprise guest.
I spent a pleasant hour talking with Martin Kuppinger (of Kuppinger Cole + Partner) about “Externalizing Identity into the Cloud: Identity Services in Cloud and Outsourcing Environments” — and we even had a surprise guest.
Popping in for a quick question or two was John Aisien, vice president of product management for Oracle Fusion Middleware in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East & Africa) region. John’s an old hand in the identity space, coming to Oracle when it acquired Thor Technology (the identity provisioning company) a few years ago.
If you missed the Webinar, there’s a rebroadcast available on the Kuppinger Cole Web site.
Cloud computing, and even identity services in or for the cloud, is too big a topic to be covered exhaustively in a single hour. If you can get yourself to Munich in December, Martin and his gang are putting on a conference devoted to cloud computing issues: CLOUD 09, Cloudsourcing Enterprise IT – Managing Risks, Gaining Rewards. It will be held from Dec. 2-4. Go here for more information and registration.
We ended the session with the question: Which organizations will be in the forefront of using cloud-based services? Martin suggested that midsize companies would be the early adopters because they would have the right blend of need, monetary resources and technological expertise. My thinking is a bit different.
Yes, there will be those who are driven by the technological imperative, but the need will come from very decentralized organizations. The need is greatest, I believe, among organizations with a low people-per-location quotient. So a small business with only one location and five employees would have a need similar to a world-class enterprise with 50,000 employees but many thousands of locations, predominantly two- or three-person offices.
The 50,000 employee enterprise might opt for “private cloud” services — cloud-based computing operated from their own data center — while the five-person organization would most likely go with commercial services such as Google Apps. But the principle is the same.
If you are at the Catalyst Conference this week, there’s an important event happening on Wednesday evening — the SSO for Cloud-Based Applications interoperability event. This is one of the areas Martin and I talked about. This demo will illustrate how standards such as SAML, WS-Federation, OpenID and others can be utilized instead of requiring a password for every off-premise application. Participants in the demo will represent a broad range of technology providers, software-as-a-service application providers, Internet properties and social software sites. For those of you who didn’t make it to San Diego, I’ll try to talk about the results of the demo next week.
