Cloud Computing: Identity – the great enabler of what’s next

Grazed from VentureBeat.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Much like Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law have fueled the utility of computing and networking industries over the past few decades, I’ve observed something else about the forward-moving nature of networking that seems to be rooted in some sort of universal law. Computers are driven to increasingly complex forms of networking to improve intelligence, efficiency, and productivity. Once networked, they never go back. Like life itself, computing is evolving into a higher form organism. With each new inter-connection, the whole system becomes smarter and more powerful. And we’re not just talking PC to PC, or smartphone to smartphone, it’s everything in between, including servers and APIs that connect people and things, consumers and enterprise.

Networking hates friction

While computing is driven to network, one of the biggest problems it introduces is how to secure each domain (e.g. protecting stuff behind the firewall), while simultaneously enabling transactions between the domains. It’s this last statement where we still have a massive problem today…

Networks hate friction. Today, we have a lot of friction in how we secure the known and authorized transactions from the unknown and unauthorized transactions that span multiple domains.  The problem manifests as one of identity. For lack of a more universal notion of identity that spans the Internet, we have a fragmented sense of identity that needs to be instantiated every time we hit a new website in the form of redundant logins…

Read more from the source @ http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/31/identity-the-great-enabler-of-whats-next/