CA has announced enhanced identity federation capabilities as part of its eTrust SiteMinder 6.0 SP5 release. These capabilities enable customers to more easily interconnect with partners, creating a seamless user experience across enterprise security domains to more rapidly capitalize on new business opportunities while minimizing IT costs.

Identity federation enables organizations to securely connect disparate business applications and processes between multiple organizations and/or autonomous internal business units -- and to manage user access rights as if they were part of the same security domain. By enabling partners in a trusted business relationship to securely share user session and identity information, users enjoy seamless access to applications across and beyond the enterprise.

The new release further expands the federation capabilities of eTrust SiteMinder to make it even easier to simultaneously interconnect with many partners. These features include support for Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), which is based on the WS-Federation specification. In addition, the new federation "end point" of eTrust SiteMinder, which leverages technology licensed from Ping Identity, helps to ease the enablement of the partnership. Combined with existing support for SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language), this enables customers to use whichever method is best suited to enable each partner relationship.

"Identity specifications are essential to secure collaboration between business partners," said Michael Stephenson, director of identity and access product management at Microsoft. "We are pleased to see CA leverage Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services to fulfill this increasingly important IT requirement."

CA is also actively engaging with the organizations and standards bodies that are defining the next generation of identity federation. In addition to working with SAML, the Liberty Alliance and the WS* set of specifications, CA is working with open source identity management projects including joining the Steering Committee for Open Source Identity System (OSIS) and participation in the Eclipse Higgins project.

"Identity federation is becoming a security and management challenge for IT organizations as federated partnerships become increasingly commonplace," said Bilhar Mann, senior vice president of Identity and Access Management at CA. "By streamlining the creation and management of these federation-enabled relationships, CA is providing its customers with a powerful competitive advantage while helping ensure that their security infrastructure and processes will scale to meet this growing demand."

eTrust SiteMinder is a key component of CA's Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution, which enables customers to reduce IT costs, mitigate security risks, and fulfill compliance requirements by centrally managing users and their access to assets across a broad range of platforms and systems-including mainframe, distributed, Internet and mobile infrastructures.

By incorporating state-of-the-art identity federation into its complete IAM solution, CA provides customers with a repeatable process for connecting with partners and helps ensure consistent enforcement of security policies.