Top 10 trends in identity management
Eventually all of these buzzword-y acronyms will assimilate. In the meantime, SOA meet IAM, who may or may not be friends with OSS.
I read last week in some print publication (that's right, people still read magazines) about a growing "superstructure" of GRC (Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance) and how it starts to address some of the shortcomings of SOA (Service-Oriented Architectures), meaning the stuff in between all the loosely coupled data flying around.
This top 10 list of Identity Management trends explores GRC and some other interesting facts. Personally I am all about trends No. 3 and 4.
Trend No. 3: Open systems and modules instead of monolithic suites
The past year has demonstrated that the core products of Identity Management--the provisioning solutions mostly referred to as "Identity Manager"--need to be opened up. However, the support by external workflows and standards like BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) are only one step in this direction. A flexible collaboration with GRC solutions should be targeted as well as a strategy for the support of ESBs (Enterprise Service Bus) for communication. The applications of the future need to be flexible to be used with other components of IT infrastructure. This also opens up market opportunities for new vendors covering sectors like MDM (Master Data Management) and BPM (Business Process Management), but also for specialists producing solutions to connect to various identity repositories such as LDAP directories.
Trend No. 4: SOA and IAM are growing together
It took awhile, but now, finally, not only vendors from both sides, but also application developers, have become aware of it: Collaboration between SOA and Identity Management is an important requirement. A discussion is beginning about which concepts for the execution of services in the context of identities are most suitable to ensure end-to-end security. This discussion will gather in pace and importance in this coming year with the result that the significance of Identity Management, particularly of Identity Federation for an application-wide use of identity data, and of virtual directories for the flexible provision of selected identity data, will continue to grow.
BTW--I am going to make an effort to move into more technical and more start-up stuff (again) since the rest of the world seems to only write about the iPhone SDK.