Bandit will aim to create services enabling disparate identity management systems to be more readily integrated. The project will work with existing industry standards such as WS- and Liberty Federation, and open source projects including Eclipse Higgins.
Novell already incorporates some of Bandit’s open identity services within its SUSE Linux distribution and says it will include more of Bandit’s services in future releases of other products. The Bandit high-level architecture includes identity infrastructure components for authentication, role-based access control, a role engine, and an audit record framework, as well as incorporating the Higgins common identity component.
Impressively, the Bandit concept seems to be in tune with every standard and approach around, including the Microsoft vision of the Identity Metasystem. Increasingly, identity and access management (IAM) is seen as the vital component that will enable enterprises to implement identity-based control and integration across their heterogeneous IT estates.
With the sole additional possibility being IBM, Novell seems the natural vendor to make such a move – it has a very strong and established background in IAM, and a broad set of offerings covering the extensive scope that this market area now fills, augmented by a more recently-cultivated open source pedigree (which many see as its alternative strategy after it became obvious that Netware would never compete strongly against Microsoft).
Open source options are increasingly becoming real, viable alternatives for enterprise customers, in large part due to the commitment of vendors like Novell. Despite the desire for ‘free’ options from the open source community, businesses need the reassurance of a certain formalization of product development and support from suppliers, and this is even more pressing a reality as open source options like those Bandit will deliver are available higher up the value chain.
It should be recognized that a number of IAM products based on open source are already established. A prominent vendor in the arena is Ping Identity, which has sponsored the open source federated identity management project SourceID. Its commercial products are PingFederate, a stand-alone federated identity server, and PingTrust, which provides integration of federated identity with web services. The company takes the innovative approach of allowing prospective customers to download its products free of charge, and use them for 100,000 transactions or 12 months before any payment is due. Ping Identity has also provided over 20,000 downloads of SourceID since it was first available in 2003.
Open source offers an interesting alternative way forward in the long term for organizations that need to integrate disparate parts of IAM solution sets, and one that potentially reduces the cost of what can be an expensive area within the IT infrastructure.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
