Friday, December 12

Melding Identity Technology into Future Architecture

One of the really fun things about being in technology is thinking about what COULD BE in the future. By now, we've all heard the promises of SOA and Identity Federation technologies. We've them each implemented to some degree. We've discussed policy servers and XACML that enable systems to share authorization information. But I think we'd all agree that we're in the pretty early stages of figuring out how an enterprise could really use all this stuff together in the future.

Last month, Todd Clayton took an ambitious step toward doing just that. He took the concept of what we want to see in the future – systems communicating freely and sharing information – and mapped out how it can be achieved using today's technology.

I don't know if the FOA moniker is the right fit (many smart IT people still don't really understand the first use of federation – we probably shouldn't start using the term elsewhere.) But, the concept is really interesting.

Now, if only there were a few brave organizations who were willing to take a leap and build out their future architecture a little early... it would be really interesting to see what we'd learn from them.

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