Vista to cure ID management headache?

New identity management technology in Windows Vista can bring down enterprise access management barriers, according to Microsoft.

By using technology known as Windows CardSpace, formerly code-named InfoCard, individuals in an organisation could grant access to outsiders without having to involve the IT department, Kim Cameron, identity and access architect at Microsoft, said in a presentation on Wednesday at the Digital ID World Conference in California.

Cameron said: "The main role of information cards in the enterprise is to devolve access control to the resource owners. Setting access control policies becomes a naturalistic and intuitive and visual process."

With today's systems, granting a third party access to a corporate resource has become fraught with red tape, stifling business, said Cameron. With CardSpace, owners of certain information resources at an organisation can easily unlock those to specific outsiders by making their own risk assessment, he said.

He added: "My belief is that trust is local. Make the granting of access easy enough so that users can do it, albeit under adult supervision."

Layers of bureaucracy have arisen from the lack of efficiencies in today's identity management technologies, according to Cameron. Typically, any kind of access control is handled by a specific department in an enterprise because the technology is very complex, he said.

Cameron said: "Business people can't actually do directly the kinds of things that they want because it is too hard. If we continue to organise this by doing it all in a centralised, bureaucratic way, then you end up with solutions that are increasingly complex."

CardSpace is a component of the Microsoft .NET Framework version 3.0, which was formerly called WinFX. Microsoft has been promoting the technology as a way to make using digital identities easier and safer and replace username and password as the means of verifying identity on the internet.

Microsoft envisions the use of CardSpace and granting access in Windows Vista to be as simple as using a Word processor. Vista, the successor to Windows XP, is due to be broadly available in January.

Cameron added: "Nowadays nobody has to go and learn how to do word processing; everybody knows how to do it. That is the kind of approach that will allow us to really have secure controlled access that works for business purposes."

Joris Evers writes for CNET News.com