Thursday, January 22, 2009
Links for 2009-01-22
The trend of securing access to ECM platforms such as Microsoft Sharepoint via XACML is growing by leaps and bounds. I am curious when Microsoft will wake up and realize that they should support this natively versus encouraging others to bolt-on security after the fact?
Everyone has a different expectation of what a reference architecture should contain. My definition would include some mention of the security model used since claims data can contain anything and everything from credit cards to social security numbers to healthcare information and therefore is a great source of risk. The ecosystem of claims also includes lots of third parties from doctors, to lawyers to autobody shops and so on. How does the world of identity look through this lens?
Mark Diodati of the Burton Group provides insight as to how SPML can enable better provisioning to enterprise applications. The IdM crowd hasn't talked much about rationale for separating the provisioning service interface from the user interface from workflow which would be more inlne with SOA and other architectural styles. This of course, may call out the fact that most provisioning products are monolithic in their architecture.
Mike Tracy of Matasano challenges an article posted by Gary McGraw on the value of Top N lists which I agree. While I believe that distillation is a mental disorder, it happens to be the status quo for many enterprise architecture teams and allows them to at least get an understanding of what they need to focus on. Of course, most shops never make it past Top N lists but the suboptimal behavior of humans doesn't make the concept flawed.
