The establishment and proof of an identity is a central network function.
An identity service is one that stores the information associated with a digital entity in a form that can be queried and managed for use in electronic transactions.
Identity services have as their core functions: a data store, a query engine, and a policy engine that maintains data integrity.
Distributed transaction systems such as internetworks or cloud computing systems magnify the difficulties faced by identity management systems by exposing a much larger attack surface to an intruder than a private network does.
Whether it is network traffic protection, privileged resource access, or some other defined right or privilege, the validated authorization of an object based on its identity is the central tenet of secure network design.
In this regard, establishing identity may be seen as the key to obtaining trust and to anything that an object or entity wants to claim ownership of.
Services that provide digital identity management as a service have been part of internetworked systems
IDentity as a Service is a FLAVor (Four Letter Acronym) of the month, applied to services that already exist.
The Domain Name Service can run on a private network, but is at the heart of the Internet as a service that provides identity authorization and lookup.
The name servers that run the various Internet domains (.COM, .ORG, .EDU, .MIL, .TV, .RU, and so on) are IDaaS servers.
DNS establishes the identity of a domain as belonging to a set of assigned addresses, associated with an owner and that owner’s information, and so forth.
If the identification is the assigned IP number, the other properties are its metadata.
IDaaS is one of largest service running in the cloud.
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