The identity industry has come a long way from the days of access control on the mainframe and the arrival more than 10 years ago of LDAP directories.  Identity management is now a multi-billion dollar market in its own right and has grown to be central to how organizations manage their security operations.

Now that the cloud has captured the attention of just about everyone in the computing industry, particularly those in the IT security world, we need to examine the cloud's impact on how identities are managed.

The identity industry is currently going through a very healthy process of reconsideration and re-architecture, along with the larger IT industry.  I like to characterize this re-architecture as a natural form of vertical disintegration.  Any student of business history knows that it is very common for industries, as they mature, to change their supply chains; to source from outside what they used to produce internally.  In many ways the whole cloud movement itself can be characterized as massive vertical disintegration of the IT industry.

The implications of this for the identity industry are powerful.  At CA Technologies we like to think about this change using the framework of:  To, For, & From.  In short, as the IT industry vertically disintegrates into a hybrid and dynamic mix of IT services being conducted in-house and via suppliers, the identity operations that secure and enable this environment need to flex as well.  Enterprises need to be able to extend their traditionally internal identity processes to incorporate their stable of cloud services - extending these processes to the cloud.  Conversely, cloud service providers themselves need to be able secure and manage their services to earn the trust of cloud consumers - improve the management of identity for their cloud services.  And finally, and as a direct reaction to the drive for vertical disintegration, enterprises are beginning to outsource multiple identity functions previously done in-house to specialized cloud providers, thus consuming these identity services from the cloud instead of conducting them all internally.

CA Technologies continues to expand our contribution to all aspects of identity and the cloud - to, for, and from.  You can read more about this here.  Identity certainly remains central to how security is managed with the emergence of IT clouds.