Identity management

This week I want to highlight our ongoing New Data Center supplements. We recently ran the second in a six-part series of features that look at the way users are reshaping their infrastructures with new technologies. Most recently we focused on security and one of the stories looked at one of the hottest topics in that realm: identity management.

The story, penned by James Kobielus is a senior analyst with Burton Group talked about the move to federation – a topic that has caused much industry confusion. Our author says federated ID management is a result of the modern world of distributed network services and refers to establishing trust relationships among decentralized security and policy domains.

Kobielus says that with a federated ID environment, a “layer of abstraction is implemented over legacy identity and security domains.” Using standardized methods, each domain can share its local identity and security information while retaining its own internal directory, metadirectory, account provisioning and public-key infrastructure services.

In a nutshell federated ID initiatives such as the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), Liberty Alliance and WS-Federation, are the leading candidates for creating federate environments.

He goes on to say with standards development, the number of companies that have built federated ID production and pilot implementations continues to grow. Burton Group estimates many more than 100 federated ID production implementations have launched throughout the corporate world.

For more on this topic see: https://www.nwfusion.com/supp/2004/ndc2/0322idmgt.html