Given that secure interoperability in today’s innovative information economy is founded on trust, the matter of “who is trusted with what” requires holistic policy, business and technology understanding and infrastructure. In response to this need for a global, holistic approach to identity, the Liberty Alliance Project emerged in September 2001.

 

Consisting of more than 160 companies, the stated goal of the Liberty Alliance is to establish an open standard for federated network identity, which addresses network identity management complications that exist today. The Liberty Alliance is thus essentially a global identity community working to build a more trustworthy Internet for businesses, governments and people in general. Members develop digital identity products that follow the standards set by the Liberty Alliance Project.

 

So-called “federated identity” allows users to “link” elements of their identity between accounts without having to store all of their personal information in a central location.

 

And now, the Liberty Alliance has announced the launch of the public Liberty Alliance Telecom Special Interest Group (SIG). The group has been established by representatives from Ericsson, NEC, NeuStar, Orange, Symlabs and TeliaSonera (News - Alert) and is the tenth Liberty Alliance special interest group open to both Liberty Alliance members and non-members. The goal of the SIG is to develop best practices for managing identity-information and identity-enabled transactions and services in the global telecom sector.

 

Members of the Liberty Alliance Telecom SIG are collaborating with other groups and standards bodies to identify and eliminate the technology and policy issues telecom operators face when it comes to the wide-scale deployment of interoperable identity-enabled applications and services. The new Telecom SIG joins a growing ecosystem of industry-specific SIGs formed by market leaders active in Liberty Alliance, such as Healthcare and eGovernment, who are working to ensure their specialized identity management and services requirements are being met by emerging technology and policy frameworks.

 

Liberty SAML 2.0 Federation and Liberty Identity Web Services are widely validated and deployed in the telecom and service provider industries. Gartner (News - Alert) states that “SAML 2.0 has become the de facto federation standard across industries.”

 

Over at Jim Burton’s (News - Alert) Burton Group, the recommend that organizations consider Liberty Alliance ID-WSF 2.0 specifications when implementing federation. The SIG is working to advance identity-enabled enterprise and Web 2.0 applications in the telecom sector based on Liberty Alliance standards and the Liberty Identity Governance and Identity Assurance Frameworks.