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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News - Security:
Leading Vendors To Demo Federated ID Using Web Services
Microsoft Corp, together with six of the industry's leading identity
management vendors, previewed interoperable federated identity management
solutions based on the Web services architecture (WS-*). Software companies
IBM Corp, Netegrity Inc, Oblix Inc, OpenNetwork Technologies, Ping Identity
Corp, RSA Security Inc and Microsoft have successfully concluded work
demonstrating how their identity management technologies interoperate using
the Web Services Federation (WS-Federation) specification, part of the WS
Security set of specifications. In his TechEd keynote address today, Andrew
Lees, corporate vice president for Server and Tools Marketing at Microsoft,
showed how federated identity management based on WS-Federation and the WS-*
architecture will simplify the work of IT professionals as they seek to cut
the cost and complexity of passing identity credentials across security and
organization boundaries in a Web services environment.
"Connecting companies offers significant business benefits by streamlining
processes and enabling new business opportunities. However, customers have
said that connecting with their partners is too complicated and often not
cost-effective," Lees said. "Today at TechEd, we are showing the industry's
ability to come together and deliver interoperable enterprise-class products
for federated identity that dramatically simplify more-secure
business-to-business commerce and collaboration using Web services standards."
"In today's business environment, companies are seeing a growing demand to
give their partners access to mission-critical applications and data," said
Jamie Lewis, CEO and research chair at Burton Group. "The need to open and
protect systems that reside behind the firewall has established federated
identity as a critical component of interoperability infrastructure. By
supporting both federated identity and application integration functions in a
consistent framework, Web services can lower both the cost and difficulty of
interoperability between business partners."
Identity federation using WS-* eliminates the need for IT professionals to
specify technical requirements for interoperability. The WS-Federation
specification itself defines mechanisms to federate identity, account,
attribute, authentication and authorization in a more secure manner.
WS-Federation is part of WS-*, as outlined in an April 2002 Microsoft and IBM
white paper, titled "Security in a Web Services World: A Proposed Architecture
and Road Map," which describes an evolutionary approach to help customers
address security in a Web services environment. IBM and Microsoft demonstrated
interoperability among their products using WS-* specifications last year.
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