Telepocalypse

Making federated identity scale

I was thinking during one talk today on federated identity how there could be a need for a whole new class of infomediaries to make identity federation scale. If you’re Wal-Mart and you have 30,000 suppliers, you aren’t going to want to manage access to your supply chain extranet applications yourself.

Even if the remote authentication assertion is done at the role level rather than named individuals (“someone allowed to access the monthly sales figures was authenticated”), just managing the PKI infrastructure and general systems management is non-trivial. Perhaps some systems integrators will step into the breach, or maybe this is an opportunity for new companies to form.

I wonder what buzzwords will be coined for identity value chain integration specialists?