Cloud Computing is still a hot topic. And there are still many different definitions out there. I personally tend to differentiate between two terms:

• Cloud: An IT environment to product IT services.
• Cloud Computing: Making use of these services – procurement, orchestration, management,…

Thus the internal IT can be understood as one of many clouds, there might even be multiple internal clouds. But we don’t have to care that much about internal, external, public, private, hybrid,… The prerequisite for an IT environment to be understood as a cloud is the service orientation, e.g. the production of well-described services. That might be done in a more or less scalable way – but it is about services.

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LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is well established. It is the foundation for today’s Directory Services, which support LDAP as a protocol and which usually build their data structure on the associated LDAP schema. There are many interfaces for developers to use LDAP, from the LDAP C API to high-level interfaces for many programming environments.

Even while LDAP is well established, it is somewhat limited. There are several restrictions – two important ones are:

• The structure of LDAP is (more or less) hierarchical. There is one basic structure for containers – and linking leaf objects (think about the association of users and groups) is somewhat limited. That structure is a heritage of X.500, from which LDAP is derived – with LDAP originally being the lightweight version of the DAP (Directory Access Protocol) protocol. X.500 was constructed by telcos for telcos, e.g. with respect to their specific needs of structuring information. However anyone who ever has thought about structuring Novell’s eDirectory or Microsoft’s Active Directory knows that there is frequently more than one hierarchy, for example the location and the organizational structure. The strict hierarchy of LDAP is an inhibitor for several use cases.
• LDAP is still focused on the specific, single directory. It doesn’t address the need of storing parts of the information in fundamentally different stores. But the same piece of information might be found locally on a notebook, in a network directory like Active Directory, in a corporate directory and so on. How to deal with that? How to use the same information across multiple systems, exchange it, associate usage policies, and so on? That is out-of-scope for LDAP.

I could extend the list – but it is not about the limitations of LDAP. LDAP has done a great job for years but there is obviously the need to do the next big step. An interesting foundation for that next big step comes from Kim Cameron, Chief Identity Architect at Microsoft. He has developed a schema which he calls system.identity. There hasn’t been much noise around before. There is a stream from last years Microsoft PDC, there is little information at the MSDN plus a blog post, there is the Keynote from this year’s European Identity Conference. But it is worth to have a look at that. The approach of system.identity is to define a flexible schema for identity-related information which can cover everything – from local devices to enterprise- and internet-style directories, from internal users to customers and device identities, including all the policies. It is, from my perspective, a very good start for the evolution (compatibility to LDAP is covered) well beyond LDAP and today’s directories.

I’ve put the concept under a stress test in a customer workshop these days. The customer is thinking about a corporate directory. Most people there are not directory guys, but enterprise IT architects. And they definitely liked the path system.identity is showing. It covers their needs much better than the LDAP schema. That proved to me that system.identity is not only for the geeks like me but obviously for the real world. Thus: Have a look at it and start thinking beyond LDAP. The concept of system.identity, despite being early stage, is a very good place to start.

There are a lot of talks about making our planet smarter. Despite being far too much fiction, the film “Die Hard 4.0″ has been around some of the potential risks around this. I recently had a very interesting discussion with a forensic/incident expert from the US. We’ve discussed several issues and ended around the idea of this “smarter planet” and the “smart grid” as one of its most prominent elements. Per se, the idea of having a networked infrastructure in many areas, with a high degree of flexibility and increased service availability is as appealing as inevitable – things will go that path.

However the security of that future seems to be somewhat ignored, at least in the public discussion. For sure politicians aren’t interested in the dark site of things as long as the bright side is discussed. They don’t want to be the party poopers. Only if there is an incident, they will claim that they have done everything to avoid it and that everyone else is guilty but not them. Vendors, on the other hand, are mainly interested in driving things forward. Most of the for sure don’t ignore security – but it seems to be more sort of a pain than an opportunity.

Thus, we observe currently the same thing in big like we can see day by day in small: Security is ignored when driving things forward. That is true for a tremendous part of the software which is developed, it is true for new standards in IT (think about web services – security has been missing at the beginning), it is true for so many other areas. And now the same thing seems to happen for all these smart things. But, from my perspective, then these things aren’t really smart.

Just think about the smart grids. This is sort of a massive data retention mechanism, collecting and networking millions of households with the utilities. There are privacy threats – who has used which electric device when? There are new attack surfaces. For sure there are some things going on around security. But from what I observe, security is developing slower than the rest of the things in the smart planet initiatives. It’s sort of a ticking time bomb out there.

What will happen? Security is undervalued. For sure it isn’t ignored but it won’t have the relevance it should have in these projects. People will cheer when there are some results of projects delivered. Security will become a problem. There will be unpleasant discussion about who is guilty or not. Security issues will be patched. To some degree. Wouldn’t it be a better idea to built security into the concepts from scratch? To really have a smarter planet at some point of time?

Sorry for being the party pooper!