Enterprise identity and access management capabilities are a fundamental prerequisite for the implementation of mission-critical Web Services, because such Services provide a layer of abstraction that hides the complexity of underlying technology while at the same time providing increased value to the business user of those Web Services. Such an abstraction layer, however, can lead to the loss of security context, where the information about the identity and access privileges of a requester of a particular Service may be lost to the underlying applications that provide the data and functionality being requested.Identity-based Web Services security solutions like Netegrity TransactionMinder restore and maintain this security context as an extension of their policy-based approach to enterprise identity management. By supporting the new Web Services security standards like SAML and WS-Security, TransactionMinder can provide the necessary identity management infrastructure for Web Services conversations that extend beyond the enterprise to users at business partners and other companies.
