Digital Identity

Consolidated Infrastructure Blueprint

The second component of your reference architecture is a consolidated infrastructure blueprint (CIB). A sample blueprint, courtesy of Burton Group, is shown in Figure 19-1.

Figure 19-1. A consolidated infrastructure blueprint

The blueprint in Figure 19-1 is a general-purpose view of what a company's identity infrastructure might look like. As you look at it, you should recognize many of the components and concepts we've discussed throughout the book.

There are two primary purposes for a consolidated infrastructure blueprint. The first is to show the actual components in your enterprise identity infrastructure and how they are connected to each other. To that end, the diagram shown in Figure 19-1 is only a starting point that must be customized to reflect reality in your organization. The general names given in the figure would be replaced by actual system and product names.

If your organization is like most, where identity infrastructure has been built in an ad hoc fashion over the years, the "as built" CIB may be quite messy and comprise multiple disconnected chunks. The "as built" CIB is used by system architects as they design their systems to determine how their system uses and connects to the enterprise identity infrastructure, and should thus be as accurate as possible.

Once you have an "as built" CIB, you can evaluate it against the maturity ...