State Of Federation, Q2 2010

The wait is over. According to Forrester's recent security survey, adoption of identity federation jumped from less than 5% two years ago to more than 12% in 2009. Why? Because software-as-a-service (SaaS) business applications forced companies to rethink their identity management strategies. Today's security and risk (S&R) teams want to do more using federation than to simply provide single sign-on and unified user account provisioning and deprovisioning to SaaS applications. Moving forward, they increasingly want federation to replace costly Web single sign-on (Web SSO) solutions as well as provide improved user experiences — and all of this comes despite difficulties with creating scalable and enforceable legal agreements for federation.