Security and Identity as a Service, IdaaS

The Identity as a Service or IdaaS is one of the new emerging areas in this ever growing world of web 2.0 and SaaS applications. The idea being that as people start using more of these applications, pretty soon it'll be commonplace to be running 5, 10, 20 or more different applications, all integrated together in one way or another.

Having all this information spread out remotely, both internal and external, add in turn-over and some other hacking concerns, will no doubt be a new problem to solve for both the industry and users of the applications.

Enter in Identity as a Service or IdaaS, as recently described in detail by Ugan Naidoo of Fujitsu Services.

"The only secure and cost-effective long-term solution is to treat identity and access management as a shared service. Identity as a service (IdaaS) is about creating a common services layer and removing application silos that have been developed in the past. With IdaaS, services will be delivered in a consistent way throughout the organization, no matter how many offices it has or where they are located."

This is an interesting idea to keep tabs on. So, in doing a bit more research/background, I did a Google news search and surprisingly found just the one article by Ugan. Moving on to the blog search with usually much more content, brought up about 211 postings, here are a few of the main ones:

Apr, 09: Jeffrey Huth, Identity as a Service, Revisited
Sep, 09: Scott Jenkins, Ideas on Idaas
Jun, 08: Matt Pollicove, Why not SaaS, exploring idea of using SaaS for identity management.
Sometime in late 2008: Identity as Service SlideShare by Prabath Siriwardena, see below:

Identity as a Service

View more OpenOffice presentations from prabathsiriwardena.

I'm sure there are a few more postings but you get the idea, this area is still very early, not much if any coverage with real solutions, but will surely be one to pay attention to in the years to come.