Posted 4:56 PM

Identity as a service

An interesting post today, from Jonathan Penn at Forrester. For the most part he's quoting his fellow analyst, Andras Cser, but does through in his own two cents worth in agreeing with Cser's definition of Identity as a Service (IDaaS):

"...implementing identity and access management functionality predominantly as Web services in a service oriented architecture within the enterprise. Various line of business applications, policy management applications, and other services then call these IM Web services either autonomously or in an choreographed manner."

I also would like to jump in with a big "+1" for this definition. It's what I was thinking of when I said about Microsoft's CardSpace: "I'm addressing the enterprise market, which needs to pay attention to CardSpace right now. Many of your in-house developers are already using the .Net framework and Microsoft's Visual Studio to create and maintain your in-house apps and services. Handling authentication, though, has been difficult at best. Now a hero has ridden forth."

Software as a service (SaaS) is going to come first to the enterprise, and IDaaS is going to be a major enabler of that technology. And CardSpace (and the associated iCard open source technology) will be the major building block of that foundation.

Labels: cardspace, digital identity, enterprise, saas