At the European e-Identity Management Conference in London

This week I am at the European e-Identity Management Conference in London. This afternoon I am speaking about identity mediation to the cloud. I'm focusing on the role of a Cloud Service Broker, using a Security Token Service for conversion between identity token types. There is a tendency to focus on the newer token types (OAuth, OpenID) but the biggest requirement is often to support the more established (and often proprietary) identity token types such as the CA SiteMinder smsession token. Mediating these to the Cloud, enabling single sign-on to the Cloud is the great value of a Cloud Service Broker working in conjunction with a Security Token Service (STS).

"Unified Field of Cloud and Enterprise"

Kim Cameron from Microsoft just gave an entertaining talk here (he joked that he is called "The Father of Identity" so often that he wonders "maybe it was something that happened when I was drunk"). Referencing David Linthicum's "Data-Integration Buzzkill for Cloud Computing" piece, he explained that you cannot consider Cloud-based systems separate from enterprise infrastructure "or indeed from other Cloud-based systems you are using from other providers", instead it is part of a "kind of unified field of cloud and enterprise". He spoke of the hybrid infrastructure of Cloud and Enterprise.

He explained that a key identity issue is that you must consider not only authentication to cloud providers (user provisioning, password synchronization) but also the larger task of managing authorization data (who is allowed to access which resource). The Authorization management problem is "exponentially larger" than the authentication problem.

To address this, he laid out an architecture which makes use of a Security Token Service (STS) to issue claims (such as "this user is aged over 21", "this user's manager is XXXX") which are then used for authorization decisions. The Security Token Service is a key piece of this "Identity Backbone for the Cloud", as laid out by Kim Cameron.