Mark Dixon on the Identity Grid

Mark Dixon posts today on the Identity Grid. I have to say right now, I am just completely impressed with the quality and frequency of Mark’s posts. I’ll also confess that, when the Waveset folks arrived at Sun nearly two years ago, and most of us saw the Identity Grid for the first time, some of us (myself included) rolled our eyes - it just looked like window dressing - eye candy. But I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve used it since as an organizing framework for our Identity Management products.
Well - Mark brings the ‘Grid up to date in this post. There’s a lot to like here - particularly the emphasis on services rather than servers and stores. I was chatting with the Wizard of IdM, Don Bowen tonight (Don - it’s been far too long since your last post!), and, as he says “there’s smarts in them there data services”. Okay - he didn’t say it like that, but that was the sentiment.
Anyway - they’re not just identity data stores anymore - there’s synchronization down there, virtualization, replication. The move from identity data stores to identity data services is like the move from flat files to database tables - sure, you can store 10 million order records in a flat file, but the world has moved on. We’re now at a position where a standard interface - LDAP - abstracts away an infrastructure that includes fault tolerance, load balancing, synchronization. Yup - directory servers are a commodity, just like file systems. The game has changed.