In today’s interconnected world, we’re being forced to re-think what identity means and to adopt entirely new models for managing it. One thing’s for sure: it’s no longer confined to inside the walls of the enterprise. The lines between internal and external data ownership are blurring. In this, our third post in the series, we’ll delve a bit deeper into what these external identities look like to help us understand the implications for IT.

Let’s start by reviewing the old model. Traditionally, all identity data was internal – each application or service stored and managed all the user information it needed – completely self contained.

But “self-contained” is really just a nice way of saying “silo.” We encounter these identity silos all the time. A large corporation may have dozens, the result of mergers and acquisitions or through the independent initiatives of multiple lines of business. We see it among business partners in value chains – retail partners, ISVs, distributors, etc. We see it in government where various departments – DMV, tax collector, police department, social services, etc. – all separately collect and manage overlapping data on the same set of users.
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