A Complete Identity Service Through Virtualization

Directory services may not sound like "le dernier cri", but still they represent a very important part of your IT infrastructure. The question for many organizations now is, how to develop their existing central directory, which had been built around their local applications, into something which is able to feed any kind of service with identity information and with context, no matter where that service runs.

The core assumption for traditional directory services was that identity creation and maintenance could be done centrally, according to the "push" version of the world. In reality, the needs of today’s infrastructure are more nuanced. The distributed nature of applications in a modern enterprise settings tends to create many different authoritative sources of identity, each controlled locally. At the same time, many identity representations and their unique attributes are best managed locally, in specialized sources. Those assumptions, and their challenges, brought the rise of the integration layer in varying forms- primarily synchronization, metadirectory and virtual directory- and these technologies yielded a new, more advanced form of identity virtualization, finally culminating in an identity and context service.

The scope of this layer goes beyond just the enterprise. The emergence of a cloud infrastructure brings new many opportunities, but also compounds the problem of information distribution, calling for even more security and extending the traditional challenges of identity management. The cloud demands smarter and more secure authentication and authorization. Identity as a service through virtualization opens a whole set of opportunities that match these complex needs. It allows identities to be securely extended beyond the enterprise, while still ensuring security and scalability.