SOA: Managing identity contexts across service requests

Two of my colleagues have a new article on IBM developerWorks:

SOA: Managing identity contexts across service requests
Identity propagation considerations in a SOA environment

Businesses embrace Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to help their IT meet the needs of their business. The loose coupling of services and their distributed nature across organizations and trust boundaries presents a number of challenges. When it comes to the reuse of existing applications or service connectivity across organizational or technological boundaries, the identity systems can vary and so can the credential systems. Managing, mapping, and propagating identity across these environments is necessary. This article discusses the business challenges when managing identity contexts in Web services and SOA. It outlines the importance of creating solutions based on standards. The security token service (STS) capability in IBM® Tivoli® Federated Identity Manager (TFIM) is a key building block that can be used in solutions to address these identity propagation requirements. This article explains the capabilities of the STS and outlines architectural approaches using TFIM to solve these needs.

Check it out here.