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03.15.06
Secure Federated Identities in an Expanding Business World
 By
John Stith
In an ever expanding and interconnected business world, secure federated identities are absolutely important. Companies and individuals need reliable methods to maneuver through their networks safely. The Liberty Alliance developed a standard for interoperable federated identities and they expect to hit 1 billion identities by the end of the year.
On Tuesday, Liberty Alliance announced a number of new deployments of their Liberty Federation and Liberty Web Services all over the world. They believe this wide-scale deployment is laying the groundwork for a more connected, secure and privacy-respecting online world based on Liberty's completely open standards for federated identity management.
"With over one billion Liberty-enabled identities and devices expected this year, Liberty Alliance specifications are the world's most widely deployed standards for managing successful identity solutions," said George Goodman, president of the Liberty Alliance management board and director, Platform Capabilities Lab at Intel.
"Today's news demonstrates the wide scale acceptance of Liberty's identity specifications as the ‘standard-of-choice' for organizations deploying open federation, identity-enabled Web services and user-centric identity solutions."
Liberty Federation provides deployers with the industry standard for solving the many authentication, privacy and security challenges surrounding online identity management.
Liberty Federation allows consumers and users of Internet-based services and e-commerce applications to authenticate and sign-on once, and then visit multiple Web sites in a federated network without having to repeat the authorization process again.
The federated identity model provides consumers with a more convenient online experience, increased privacy and better protection against fraud and identity theft.
Enterprises deploying open federation are able to manage identity information across organizational boundaries and networks easier and more cost effectively.
The universal standard being pressed by the Liberty Alliance and their members is a good idea for a number of reasons, the most important of which is secure networks and secure identities. With federated identity systems, that security is absolutely essential, not just from a business viewpoint, but in some cases, perhaps even a national security viewpoint.
"As momentum for Liberty's open identity specifications continues to build, there can be no doubt that Liberty Federation and Liberty Web Services are allowing organizations to deploy more secure and privacy-respecting identity solutions," said Roger Sullivan, vice president of the Liberty Alliance Management Board and vice president of business development for Oracle's Identity Management solutions.
"Liberty is demonstrating its strong momentum in the worldwide identity sector and reinforcing its long-standing commitment to providing organizations with the open technologies, educational support and business and privacy guidelines for managing successful federation and identity-enabled Web services."
About
the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security. |
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