Home » Identity & Access » Federated IDM

In Depth

Federated ID: An Idea Whose Time Never Came?

A few years ago, advocates for federated ID management said the technology would be in mainstream use by now. That prediction hasn't come to pass for a variety of reasons

By Bill Brenner, Senior Editor

Page 2

"Companies have a hard time implementing single sign-on within their own networks for their employees," he says. "The fact is most environments have too many distributed systems." He says it's hard enough to manage one security system. Bring in numerous systems and many more users across a wide area of internal and external domains and the challenge is simply too rich for many companies.

"In short, users love it but it is challenging and costly to build relationships and connect various domain systems through technical standardization," he adds. "If successful, independent reviews of third-party system security such as SAS 70 will become extremely important."

Despite these factors, federated ID vendors are keeping the faith.

True, adoption may not be at the blockbuster levels hoped for three years ago, but the deployments that have happened have been very successful, according to Vatsal Sonecha, vice president of product management and business development at Tricipher Inc. The vendor's myOneLogin suite of on-demand services has been a particularly popular product, impressing the likes of Mike Murray.

He admits federated ID is a tough nut for many companies to crack, especially when it comes to the complexities of getting it deployed across different organizations. His company's approach has been to solve the problem by making it an "in-the-cloud" service that doesn't rely on as much infrastructure. He predicts that approach will lead to a significant spike in deployments by this time next year.

For now, he says, adoption is most robust in the healthcare arena, both on the enterprise side and the patient and payment portal sides.

"We are talking to several large partners who really want to solve this issue," he said, noting that interest has come from sectors outside of healthcare as well. "Point-to-point federation isn't really working, hence the in-the-cloud approach, and I think that will lead to more adoption."