Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Where's My Jetpack

The UK federation was launched in November 2006 and has reached 690 members and membership is still growing. It is a deliberately inclusive federation - it includes all of the education sector and anyone providing services to that sector. Federations are essentially enablers of communication between this vast membership.

Ian demonstrates that current implementations by institution shows an even division between use of in-house identity management and outsourced identity management. Service Provider implementations came much later in the day for the UK federation but are now outstripping institutional implementations.

The Jetpack refers to Ian's assertion that the future is already here, it is just not widely distributed yet.

The UK is the first adopter of concepts such as outsourced identity managers and adoption in the schools sector. A similar type of uptake is expected in other countries. Scale is important for adoption. The UK federation is now seen as a 'must have', this position has not been reached in the US.

Software diversity based on standards is important in the UK federation. This provides choice, business models and sustainability. It is also noted that people get support for their software choices from a variety of other places than the UK federation itself.

There is a problem with helping users find the right place to log-in - it is known as the 'discovery problem'. Although the UK federation provides a WAYF (Where are You From) process to help guide users, it is better if this is integrated in to the Service Provider interface - Service Providers know how to best present information about their customers.

Authentication processes are in the process of changing - usernames and passwords will not be the process used in the future. People are starting to use cards, tokens or USB devices for access, and this will get more common. This will quickly be followed by interfederation - federations talking to federations, thus making the experience more seamless for Service Providers and Identity Providers.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it - Alan Kay.

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1 Comments:

Anonymous hydration said...

I don't get this. "Authentication processes are in the process of changing - usernames and passwords will not be the process used in the future." Could you please enlighten me on this? I keep following all your posts hope you can regularly post more. I get very useful information here. Thanks for having this.



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