Open Identity – Shared Services Architecture

Image by palindrome6996 via Flickr

Recently in Canada the Federal Government announced the ‘Shared Services Canada’ initiative, a consolidation program intended to save $$ hundreds of millions through data-centre efficiencies.

We ran a Cloud Best Practices webinar on the topic, to introduce the role that CMM might play (Cloud Migration Management).

My initial introductory presentation was on the topic of shared service technologies, most notably Federated Identity, a theme we continue on this blog through a focus on the USA Government program ‘Open Identity for Open Government‘.

This is their initiative to implement an open standards based federated identity ‘ecosystem’, where as it explains on this other page this is achieved through implementing these technologies via shared service design models. Of course this means they could be incorporated into the design process for Canada too, and aligned to various program goals like enabling a universal government identity for staff (“GEDS 2.0″).

In short these are practices that Canada will likely start to follow in the near future, as will many other Governments throughout the world, highlighting the associated commercial opportunity too.

What’s important about the standards framework that the USA Government has defined is that it encourages external suppliers to implement and offer managed services based on these specifications. For example Verizon recently joined Google, Equifax and others in offering these Identity services to the American public sector.

What’s most critical about these programs is the role they play as smart economic stimulus. For example in this Whitehouse blog they make the specific point they are looking for more suppliers, they cultivate an active market by adopting modern technologies that drive related service innovations in their local supplier base, ie. American firms who therefore become more competitive.

Trusted Cloud Providers

To achieve this service providers go through an accreditation process with ‘Trust Framework Providers‘, organizations like the Kantara Initiative, who stipulate the best practices for these Identity systems and also oversee the approval of players within the system.

The US Government has approved Kantara to act as an authority over who can be approved to act as an Identity Provider, and with related innovations growing in their local markets, it’s likely this combination will expand out from the USA into the international community.

Ie. they’ll adopt Kantara standards and the related products will enter their markets.