How SOA impacts Identity Management?
As SOA environments are typically highly decentralized in nature, identity management becomes a significant challenge for web services. Identities can be stored in many directories as well as many different types of directories, including proprietary username/password repositories, LDAP, Active Directory, and X.509 certificate stores. An additional challenge is that SOA may have requests that result in additional requests to many different applications at once. An SOA-ready service may be composed of many service operations from many different services that each have their own identity. As part of a single transaction, many different services may be touched whether in parallel or in serial. Being able to authenticate and be authorized across all of these systems seamlessly improves the user experience as well as performance driving the need for a federated identity solution for SOA environments.
