(1) WG NAME
Identity and Access Services Working Group (IAS-WG)
(2) PURPOSE
Organizations recognize the need for the unambiguous expression of identity. Identity can represent a physical individual, a collection of individuals, a logical entity, a resource or a capability. Identity is a fundamental element for establishing and maintaining business relationships, and for describing the credentials, capabilities, and responsibilities of parties to a relationship.
The principal business problem that drove the formation of the original Identity Services Working Group (under the auspices of Burton Group) is the difficulties companies face when integrating vendor Identity management (IdM) products with their existing infrastructure and, increasingly, in integrating vendor products themselves. As vendors continue to add to their IdM suites, integration between products is a challenge of increasing concern to organizations.
Integration between systems is achieved by:
- Portability – Business application components can be decoupled from dependencies on the operating systems and/or underlying hardware on which they run. Application components can access system-level services through programming interfaces. Integration can be achieved because the application relies on the OS or container to perform, for example, authentication or similar Identity-related services on its behalf
- Interoperability - Business application components can communicate with identity services (and vice versa) through a set of interfaces that specify a common set of semantics. These interfaces may be implemented by, but not limited to, web services. Interoperability is also important with respect to communication between business application components themselves, but that is not the focus of the charter