Digital Identity

Identity Management Architectures

The most difficult part of getting identity management right isn't technical. Management, policy, and even political issues are more likely to be the things that stand in the way of success. To that end, the final section of this book will describe a methodology for creating what I call an identity management architecture (IMA) that can help you overcome these challenges.

An IMA is unique to each organization. Creating an IMA for your organization requires a firm framework for governance and understanding the business context within which it will operate. To that end, the methodology in this book includes detailed ideas about how you can document, analyze and understand the business context that your identity infrastructure will have to support.

An IMA has three primary components:

Process Architecture

The process architecture is a methodology for determining how your business accomplishes identity related tasks now and how they should be accomplished in the future. The architecture is based on an identity infrastructure maturity model that lays out how processes can be changed to make them more effective in supporting the identity needs of the business.

Data Architecture

The data architecture is a model of the identity data in your organization. Recently, a number of news stories have highlighted organizations that lost control of identity data and were publicly embarrassed over the resulting privacy concerns. Getting a handle on where your identity ...