Just Released: Architecture Journal 16 on Identity and Access

 Two years ago,  when an article of mine about evolving architectures was published in an independent IT magazine, a colleague said to me, “You should write for The Architecture Journal.” I couldn’t have predicted that I would now find myself writing for this magazine as its editor. I want to thank Simon Guest for this opportunity and these big shoes to fill; during his tenure, readership has more than doubled, increasing from 30,000 to 62,000+.

In this issue, we invite you to think about the identity architecture in your organization. Identity management today is evolving from the single, isolated scenario to a federated one, in ways that might surprise you.

We begin this sixteenth journey with Fernando Gebara Filho’s introduction to identity concepts and strategies, how they have evolved and the road ahead. Next, Jesus Rodriguez and Joe Klug examine an assortment of strategies for making identity a first-class citizen in the portfolio of federated applications. Gerrit van der Geest and Carmen de Ruijter Korver consider the challenge of establishing an application-level trust environment, as user identities, in a service-oriented world, must flow from a service consumer to a provider.

For this issue’s profile, we caught up with Kim Cameron, author of “The Laws of Identity,” whose ideas on federated identities are shaping the next generation of Microsoft identity technologies. (A funny thing happened the day I visited Kim for this interview: I forgot my ID badge, so I needed Kim to “certify” my identity to the lobby.)

Resuming our journey, Mario Szpuszta describes how the Austrian healthcare system turned an administrative provisioning crisis into a clear opportunity for creating an open identity federation. Then Vittorio Bertocci explains how architectural patterns allow us to build claim-aware solutions, so that when the cloud arrives to companies, identity management won’t necessarily look cloudy.

Finally, Mike Morley and Barry Lawrence reveal how they synchronized identities on multiple systems and legacy applications from a single administrative console through a consolidating framework.

Dear reader, I’d like to be the first to welcome you to the issue, and hope that you’ll identify with the articles within. Enjoy!

Bonus article:

David Chou offers a comprehensive view of strong user authentication by examining its concepts, implementation approaches, and challenges and additional concerns