Federated Identity Management Paper

In both private and public sectors, organisations are building Information Technology infrastructure to improve their business capacity. There is a notable growth in the integration of organisations and forming of federations. This integration however is accompanied by some overhead for managing identities of employees, business partners, and customers, as the cost for dealing with the life cycle of user identities is very great. This is true because the relationship between an organisation and users can change often, and each change that occurs requires administration to act. This is also cumbersome for the individual if they are required to register a separate account for all the organisations that they access.
The intent of this paper is
Federated Identity Management
A federation is defined as a group of business partner who work together (Axel Buecker et al, 2008) and according to (CERN OPEN, 2013), Federated Identity Management (FIM) is an arrangement that can be made by multiple organisations that lets subscribers use the same identifications data to get access to the secured resources of all organisations in the
These trust relationships are forged using informal and legal agreements between the members of the federation. Before a federation can begin to operate, the agreements need to be in place (Axel Buecker et al, 2008).
According to Axel Buecker (2008), once all the federation and business agreements are put in place, the federation members can begin to operate together using suitable technology that supports the arrangements made by the federation. The technology provides the federation with trust management capabilities, cryptography support and protocol functions that make it possible for a secure partnership to take place in a distributed setting.
To manage all identities throughout a federation, FIM provides a uniform system for making identity management across company boundaries simple. This system allows organisations to unload identity access management costs to the organisations partners in the federation. This makes it possible for an organisation to receive trusted data about a user without registering that user and without the user being required to provide identity more than once.
Moritz Platt (2005) provides a perfect illustration of a federated identity management system in figure