Managing customer identities is much harder than it might look. The basic principles that guide the management of any kind of identities are the same. But the devil is in the detail. Scalability, flexibility and especially deployment efficiency are the crucial elements of success. But these are not the usual traits of identity management software. Customer identity management can easily turn into a very expensive nightmare. Not doing it at all is usually not an option as today it is almost impossible to find a company that does not provide electronic services to customers. It just has to be done. And it has to be done quickly. What was almost impossible to do a couple of years ago is quickly becoming a "must have". But how to make the management of huge number of customer identities practical and especially economically feasible? How does access management, federation, directories and provisioning all fit together to create an efficient customer-oriented solution?
