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2008, that'll dig into depth what threats to expect in 2008 and how to
effectively combat them.
On the business side, collaborating with partner companies to provide customers
and employees with products and services is a top priority that promises to
increase revenue, customer loyalty, and competitive advantage. But for IT, the
growth in these multi-party relationships and delivery as Web services poses
vexing issues on how to manage user identities.
How can partnering organizations verify the digital identities of thousands
or even millions of individuals across an extended enterprise of disparate partner
domains while providing users with single sign-on (SSO)? How can IT protect
access to applications and information and secure Web services delivery? How
can multiple IT systems authenticate and authorize the identity of, for instance,
a wireless phone customer or a stock trader?
The answer is identity federation -- the technologies and standards that allow
partnering organizations to securely share digital identities across multiple
domains. Identity federation provides an auditable framework by which an organization
accepts that external users have been authenticated by a trusted partner, and
enables SSO across partner sites.
While many companies are beginning to use Web services security to secure federated
transactions, others continue to rely on point-to-point solutions that can be
overly complex and fall short of the higher levels of identity-based security
possible with federation. For instance, secure socket layer (SSL) security provides
no identity capture, no auditing capabilities, no means of enforcement, nothing
to prove what happened in a Web services transaction. Those capabilities are
built into leading identity federation solutions.
The Journey from SSO to SOA
The concept of identity federation has been around for several years. Initially,
the focus was on developing common standards that would enable partnering organizations
to securely share identity data. Because every company that does business with
companies beyond its confines must grapple with how to manage identity across
boundaries, identity federation is increasingly a hot topic for both IT and
business. Its role in this essential challenge has unfolded in three stages.
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