Digital Identity

Identity Management Architectures

The most difficult part of getting identity management right isn't technical. Management, policy, and even political issues are more likely to be the things that stand in the way of success. To that end, the final section of this book will describe a methodology for creating what I call an identity management architecture (IMA) that can help you overcome these challenges.

An IMA is unique to each organization. Creating an IMA for your organization requires a firm framework for governance and understanding the business context within which it will operate. To that end, the methodology in this book includes detailed ideas about how you can document, analyze and understand the business context that your identity infrastructure will have to support.

An IMA has three primary components:

Process Architecture

The process architecture is a methodology for determining how your business accomplishes identity related tasks now and how they should be accomplished in the future. The architecture is based on an identity infrastructure maturity model that lays out how processes can be changed to make them more effective in supporting the identity needs of the business.

Data Architecture

The data architecture is a model of the identity data in your organization. Recently, a number of news stories have highlighted organizations that lost control of identity data and were publicly embarrassed over the resulting privacy concerns. Getting a handle on where your identity data is and what processes affect it will help you avoid these problems and help you build an infrastructure that is responsive to business needs.

Technical Reference Architecture

The technical reference architecture is how the IMA communicates implementation guidance to system architects, the people who design the systems that use identity processes and data.

Later chapters in the book will discuss each of these components in detail and help you build processes in your organization to create them. Each of these components makes use of two other important parts of an IMA:

Policies

Policies are crucial in creating identity infrastructures that work for the simple reason that it's impossible to create technical solutions to every problem. Ultimately, the behavior of people in your organization will determine whether or not your identity infrastructure meets its operational goals.

Interoperability Framework

An interoperability framework is a list of standards that your organization has chosen to support and use. Making these decisions explicit is critical to building an identity infrastructure.

Some organizations believe that they can't be bothered to create policies and make standards decisions, but I hope that the chapters on these two important subjects will change your mind and show you how policies and standards can be liberating, rather than confining, for your business.

Digital identity is at the core of almost every modern business process. I'm confident that an IMA will help your organization, regardless of its size, use digital identity technologies to build an infrastructure that will pay dividends in every other area of your business.