The Rise of Federation Part 2 - Critical Mass

In a previous blog post I wrote about something I called "The rise of federation". As we have watched all the buzz and announcements in the IT we've seen a 10-fold increase the use of the word 'Cloud' and this has come to mean alot of different things. A common thread in all these things is that boundaries between organizations are becoming increasingly blurred and new paradigms are taking hold allowing us to capitalize on the new opportunities.

ADFS 2.0 - Release candidate

The thing that prompted me to write this long-overdue blog posting is the Release Candidate of Active Directory Federation Services V2, available at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/ee476597.aspx. ADFS V2 is scheduled to be released in the first half of calendar 2010. More information is available at the Geneva team blog here.

The top line feature in ADFS V2 is the SAML 2.0 protocol support. This is a very important feature as it mostly eliminates concerns about compatibility between different vendors' offerings. It will be a plug-and-play scenario for federated identity, and a great many customers will be able to reap the benefits. WS-* and WS-Federation (and WS-Trust etc etc.) are still first-class citizens in this space also, but now we can worry less about compatibility and focus our efforts on delivering great applications.

Federated identity technology, very simply, allows us to securely share relevant identity data across organizational and trust boundaries. The need for this level of sharing has sharply increased in recent years and it would appear the trend is only accelerating. From the enterprise standpoint IT organizations need to outsource non-business-critical functions and focus their energies on creating or sustaining competitive advantage, delivering improved services at lower costs, and enabling new kinds of connectivity.  It is these needs that fuel the movement to cloud-based computing models where greater economies of scale can be achieved. And it is also these needs that further the rise of federation. Federated identity is a key enabler for the shift to cloud based computing,  and it promises to make life easier for end users and reduce the IT administration and security compliance burden.