Identity Management: Why SOA and Identity Management Go Hand in Hand

by Robin Bloor
July 31, 2008

It’s often difficult to justify building an identity management service in a strict cost/benefit manner, because most of the manual admin costs associated with identity management tasks are spread across the organization—activities that tend to occur when new staff join or leave, or reorganizations take place. Nevertheless, automating them makes a genuine difference, and such tasks will become much more troublesome and error-prone if they aren’t automated as SOA is introduced.

Although it’s rarely given much prominence, identity management is one of the pillars of SOA. With SOA you work toward building a computing environment where new business services can be quickly and incrementally added; however, you can’t reliably deploy such services unless you can easily provision them to the intended users and secure them. For this reason, when I’m hired to consult by companies that are moving to SOA, I frequently feel obliged to raise the topic of identity management.