Must-Have Characteristics of an Identity Services Layer

Mark Dixon has just written a post about the critical characteristics an Identity Services layer must have to become part of Enterprise architecture. These characteristics are born from the idea that identity services will become to enterprise applications what dialtone was to the (extremely successful) telephone service – the very backbone on which it all runs. The characteristics Mark identifies are:

• Highly available
• Highly reliable
• Highly standard
• Easily recognized
• Simple to use
• Usable
• Ubiquitous
• Critical to our daily activities
• So commonplace we take it for granted

While there is still a way to go before identity services can fulfill all these characteristics, the day isn’t far when there is sufficient coverage of these features to be able to sustain critical mass.