Identity via SOA

Nishant Kaushik of Oracle provides an excellent overview of Identity as a Service and raises a good point about the ambiguity of the phrase. The industry has become comfortable with the phrase Software as a Service to represent hosted software solutions. So, IaaS will naturally bring to mind hosted Identity services analogous to that of SaaS. We have enough ambiguity and confusion in this space, don't we? (see: SSO vs. RSO vs. ESSO) I vote for a rename of the enterprise identity-via-SOA concept. Then, mass education of this important concept. If we want people to immediately understand what this is, how about something along the lines of i4SOA - Identity for SOA. Of course, this can cause confusion with providing identity and security services for the SOA itself. Or IvSOA - Identity via SOA. Whatever we call it, this is the direction we need to be heading. Build an identity services layer based on open protocols and reachable via SOA standards and integration & infrastructure flexibility will become significantly easier to achieve. Thanks Nishant! The diagrams are well done.