As the 2007 version, the KPC Identity Management Roadmap 2008 provides a multi-level structure for the development of Identity Management – starting from the basic aspects that rather address an administrative view, via a growing service orientation reaching up to a business perspective and business control which typically allows the information owner to define the way in which “his” identity data will be handled, instead of being occupied with technical ACLs.
Apart from our vision of the future development of Identity Management and its growing focus on business integration and bundling of information, it is important to emphasize that any successful Identity Management must be built up on a solid foundation.
We keep getting requests regarding the strategic review of projects that address “Meta directories”. And these projects – irrespective of the used terms and technologies – still deserve attention. They are concerned with the most important basis for successful Identity Management: creating a structure allowing for trustworthy and reliable identity information to be stored and accessed. Whether this will be realized in terms of a directory to take up provisioning data, or a special database, a virtual structure or a typical synchronized Meta Directory, is not really the decisive factor. More importance should be attached to the subsequent question how to get to high-quality identity data, where they stem from and how they can be changed and used.
Only after this homework has been done, the next and further steps can be made, for example building up trust positions within federation relations or offering applications capable and reliable authentication and authorization services in the context of an application security infrastructure.
All further steps as authentication, authorization, auditing and the effective realization of rules concerning Segregation of Duties or the profiling of information on the basis of identity data highly depend on a good quality of the identity data.
In advanced Identity Management implementations, this implies to repeatedly make a stop and direct one´s view to the data basis and the processes that change it, to continuously guarantee for a secure and solid fundament. As the quality of data tends to decrease in the long run, the creation of data quality must not be considered a one-time project, but a continuous task, and it would be fatal to lose sight of it.
By the way, the Roadmap will be completed in the next days. We will provide essential basic information in a free Webinar to which you will be invited in due time. The complete document will also be available as a report which is free of charge for our contract customers. The price for a single order will be 690 Euro plus VAT.