The power of Identity Management: Blockchain, Microsoft and ION

In the race to create new and compelling features and functionality that are marketing-friendly, many forget about digital identity. It’s an easy one to overlook: unless there’s a visually exciting use case that can be attached to it, digital identity sounds a lot like basic IT management with some insertion of security and privacy policy. Great as a core “guess I have to have it” platform, but not something that moves the needle from a user experience standpoint.

Except digital identity and how to tackle an increasingly complex and scalable world is perhaps one of the biggest challenges and stories of the next decade. As we see an increasing amount of applications and services in the IoT space, digital identity is likely to be central to everything we do. Our personal preferences, application and data usage, connectivity into disparate services, media consumption -and absolutely the security required for all of these- will drive identity management to the top of everyone’s list.

Identity management has struggled in two areas: overall validation and security -particularly when connecting services together- and the ability to scale this service over time. Both factors quickly become limiting to forward progress, which the world continues to ask for more from the products and services being offered. It doesn’t work to have twenty applications on a phone; the requirement for a single, converged identity is necessary to unlock real value for a consumer. You need to be able to select, purchase, transfer, connect and consume quickly and with one ID. But delivering on identity verification has been a struggle.

Winning the “race” for highly secure, highly scalable identity management can ultimately be far more important than search or advertising.

Today, Microsoft unveiled ION, or “Identify Overlay Network” which utilizes the Bitcoin blockchain. To the uninitiated, Blockchain allows two individuals to securely manage information using cryptographic protocols to verify their identities, rather than relying on a central clearing house to do that verification work. This has several advantages, certainly for Microsoft, but also for the developers that utilize ION for identity management.

ION allows developers to create decentralized identifiers (DIDs) that they own, manage, and control as part of an identity management system. DIDs are a relatively new type of identifier for a verifiable, “self-sovereign” digital identity. The DID subject fully manages the DID, and assumes full control over it, independent from any centralized registry, identity provider, or certificate authority.

One of the stumbling blocks to the blockchain model has been the speed. Compared to a more traditional cloud-based Active Directory system, identity processing using this model is significantly slower in terms of its ability to scale. Speed becomes a major issue, and with speed issues come cost. This has hampered growth, combined with a general lack of understanding of blockchain and where it can go. ION has the potential to solve this.

For a developer or company, it can mean a far easier method to provide identity management. At scale, it can mean a solution to user connection and validation into a common account… at the small cost of committing to the Microsoft environment. Winning the “race” for highly secure, highly scalable identity management can ultimately be far more important than search or advertising; because getting companies to commit and invest into a platform for identity-management that makes it a standard is extremely powerful in our new world. If it works, it may be one of the most important moves Microsoft has made.

More information on ION can be located here.