Thoughts on Policy and Identity for the Network
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008Zeus Kerravala at Yankee has a nice column at Network World on the opportunity around network, identity, and policy integration. He writes:
Ultimately, getting policy to reside in a central location is the key. Rather than many disparate systems with policy information, enterprises need to have a single policy store, intimately tied to the identity store, where the network infrastructure can apply and enforce policy on all traffic. Having policy management in the core-with control at the edge-is the only scalable model for pulling together network, identity, and policy.
It is great to see more folks in the industry coalescing around this idea. The only thing I might take issue with is his goal of a single policy store. While that might be the best-case design ideal, I think the real world will require a much more collaborative approach. This is part of the reason my company writes all its policies using XACML. We’re expecting the need to share policy over time.
