There are many proprietary Identity Management solutions out there, I should know I’ve worked with most of them from Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Novell, IBM Tivoli and now Microsoft FIM. Each have developed a way of accessing and provisioning to databases, but there must be a better way.
But wait, there is and it’s called “Service Provisioning Markup Language” SPML and it’s been around for over 10 years. So why has the industry not taken this up ? After all Oracle has been involved in SPML from the beginning but as yet haven’t added support for SPML provisioning of Oracle DB accounts. But it’s not just Oralce, neither has IBM, Sun, or Microsoft with their DB products, and they have ALL been involvement in the SPML standard on one form or another over the years. But it’s not just the database guys, the same is true when you look at directories, email systems, etc. So come on guys pull your finger out !
The good news is that SPML is getting some focus at long last, and organisation like Novell and Ping Identity seem to be leading in grasping this nettle.
It will be interesting to see what comes out of these talking, currently SPML v2.0 as defined by OASIS is getting a hard time, maybe it’s time to go back to the drawing board and refine the standard for v3.0. Simplifying the challenges of provisioning has to be good for everybody, doesn’t it ?