Directory services may be old news, but they still represent an important part of the IT infrastructure. The question for many organizations is how to take an existing directory that grew up around locally served applications and services such as file and print, and use it with cloud-based services such as Google and Salesforce.com. Too often, the answer is to avoid integration between local identities and the cloud. That choice, convenient as it may be in the short run, is likely to blow up in one's face someday. As cloud-based services proliferate, the potential only increases for trouble through a compromised user identity, or a dropped ball on the part of an administrator provisioning services for users.

Enter Symplified and its SinglePoint cloud-based single sign-on services, which were refreshed in summer 2010 with an array of new features designed to keep local user stores and cloud-based services on the same page. Symplified's approach to SSO makes heavy use of open-source technologies and methods such as SAML and XACML to perform its chores...

Read the complete article by P. J. Connolly in eWeek.