Thursday, 18 September 2008

One Important Difference between Federation & Internal IdM Projects

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We've met with a lot of companies recently who have now decided to ramp their federation efforts. They've mostly tinkered for the past 2 years, but they are now planning to really turn the crank.

What's interesting about our conversations is that invariably, they talk about one or more of their internal provisioning, IdM or WAM projects that is basically not meeting their expectations. What I find interesting about this is that federation deployments, by their very distributed nature, are taking an entirely different approach. Most if not all centralization projects are large, costly, complex and long. This makes them inherently more risky, and introduces higher and higher probabilities of failure at one or more levels.

On the contrary, federation has never over-sold it's promise. We (Ping and our customers) experience success one-connection at a time.

Even though Ping now offers "federated provisioning" in PingFederate 5.2 to Salesforce and Google Email (& Apps), don't somehow put PingFederate into the 'provisioning' bucket. We don't promise the world. We promise to automate provisioning and federated identity life-cycle to 2 SaaS applications (more coming of course, but the number will be measured in dozens, not hundreds or thousands). We're happy to succeed, one connection at a time.