At this year's RSA 2010 Conference the Kantara Initiative is celebrating its first birthday with a day-long workshop entitled Technology, Policy, and Compliance for Identity Services in 2010 & Beyond.  It was just a year ago at the RSA Conference 2009 that a number of organizations publicly announced their intention to found this identity focused industry consortium.  Soon after, in June of 2009, the Kantara Initiative was officially born.  This prompted my first blog about the organization.

In many ways this workshop shows both the progress of and the need for Kantara.  As the identity industry has matured and broadened so must the collaboration around the issues of technology, policy, privacy, and compliance.  No longer is identity an exclusively large enterprise issue.  Like with other technologies, what is for the consumer and what is for the enterprise are blurring and colliding.  Just look at the participating organizations for the workshop, in addition to identity and security vendor mainstays such as CA and Oracle, you have well known organizations that at first blush might not be considered identity-centric organizations, such as PayPal, NTT, Google, NIH and others.  This workshop really represents a microcosm of the broader identity marketplace - all in one convenient room at the Moscone Center.

In my session, Identity as Security Glue for the Cloud, I will be presenting with Chris Sharp of MEDecision.  Without tipping my hand too much, I plan to review the models of cloud computing (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) and how categories of identity and access management and related standards play a central role in how security must be managed both for and in the cloud.  As a live example, Chris will discuss his healthcare related service and how he is using standards-based identity services to keep operations running smoothly.

If you are coming to the RSA Conference I encourage you to register for this Kantara workshop and take part in the celebration.