Ping Identity® — One password is all it takes.

Ping Identity > Blogs > Ping Talk 

Ping Talk Blog

From Firewall to Identitywall

March 19, 2010, Andre Durand | IdM

Andre Durand

There seems to be an awakening that the walled garden paradigm of security is irrevocably changing and it's being driven by a shift to cloud computing.

When the dust settles around a new emerging class of Internet-scale identity providers, we will in a sense have erected a new sort of wall around the Internet -- an Identitywall. In this new landscape, identity providers will be responsible for vetting and strongly authenticating users to a session that will then be ported across lots of security boundaries over the Internet vis-a-vis things like identity federation. As I drew the picture, it dawned on me that I was in fact drawing another "hard on the outside, soft in the middle" scenario, similar to the way you would think of a firewall protecting systems, but different in that we were talking about a system that scaled far beyond current systems.

As the things we need to protect become more distributed and as the things we want to access become more inherently cross-domain, identity portability allows us access things in a much more dynamic way than what might otherwise have been achievable in the old, more static paradigms.

Interesting times indeed to be in the identity business.




TweetBacks
Comments

There are no comments for this entry.

[Add Comment] [Subscribe to Comments]