Traditionally, identity management solutions were deployed internally to support employees and other third party users like partners.  These identity management solutions (from multiple vendors) are currently in use in organizations or all sizes across all vertical markets around the world, generally dealing with user populations in the thousands.  But in today's increasingly interconnected IT environment, organizations may now need to manage identities of millions of users and support those users throughout the entire identity lifecycle.

During CA World, I attended a session that discussed recent testing that the CA IAM team undertook with Accenture to verify the ability of CA Identity Manager to scale to support millions of users for use cases such as:

• A government agency allows citizens to self-identify and register for access to external facing applications. Potentially millions of citizens may need to register for a specific event, online notification or government-to-citizen account.
• A company selling goods and services over the internet needs to securely capture and manage their customer information for real-time purchasing, enable faster checkout processing and simplify opportunities for repeat business. Usage may be cyclical and highly dependent on specific events, days and times that can cause a spike in user activity.
• Consumer products and retail establishments that need to securely capture and track customer responses to a global promotion. New user registrations will cause an increase in normal volume as the promotion is rolled out to different regions.

The test scenarios verified the ability of the CA Identity Manager architecture to withstand the high volume of users and virtual transactions without major failures or degradation of backend processing.

A white paper has been published discussing the tests and the findings. You can find it here. You also can access CA World 2011 sessions and keynotes here.

This work further demonstrates the maturation of identity management technology and indicates that identity management can support these types of high volume B2C use cases, giving organizations confidence that existing employee-centric identity management implementations can support the high scalability requirements of tomorrow's IT infrastructure.