Federation, a nice to have or a necessity?

Having spent the last couple of weeks travelling around and speaking with a lot of customers, I find myself in a bit of a dilemma when it comes to Federation. A quick harp back to my initial entry on terminology, what is Federation? In very simple terms Federation is a way of sharing identity information about a person between two or more organisations. Ultimately this is something which is beneficial to the person who owns the identity (through experience), and also beneficial to the organisations (financially, usually), in much the same way as BSM.

If we just think about it, in our normal day to day lives we would be able to manage without some form of federation. I mean that there are trust relationships which we have with one organisation or body which is trusted by another. I know I couldn’t manage without my passport, a standard document which is approved and given to us by an issuing body, and which other immigration services are able to understand and therefore allow us.

The underlying principle being used here is trust. Trust that I have come from the country I am saying I have come from, and trust between the two countries. The same principle is used in our technological world, which allows us to come from one organisation who is able to tell a partner organisation who I am and that it’s OK to trust me.

All sounds good so far, so where’s the dilemma. The dilemma lies in that small little word “trust”. Easy to say, hard to both earn and define. Trust is something that often does not go hand in hand with financial gains and losses. The underlying backbone of Federation is the trust policies which are set between organisations. Yes the technology exists but, if we remember back to the heady days of 1999/2000 PKI existed as a great technology which would solve all our security issues, but the trust between organisations slowed down the uptake, but 5 or 6 years.

I would like to think that we have all learned a lot from this, and that early adopters of any technology always exist, and can benefit massively from the new business which can come from this, it only takes one bad experience to leave the trust policies in tatters.

My overall feeling in Federation is that we have a technology in our hands that has been driven out of the ultimate necessity for companies to have new ways to drive more business, and that we from the technological world need to help those in the legal/business world to successfully deploy these. We all learned lessons 5 or 6 years ago, it would be foolish to forget these!