To stay competitive, organizations must extend their operations beyond traditional boundaries to include sharing access to information resources and services not only with its employees, but also customers, partners, public agencies and vendors.

Organizations must be able to quickly and efficiently provision and de-provision all user identities with accounts and appropriate access rights on those systems you need to expose to your federation partners; in a flexible, secure, and transparent way. The sharing of trusted identities and policies is the key to delivering both a richer experience for users navigating within or between federation sites and reducing the cost of identity management. (See Federated Authority Management)