NEW DELHI, INDIA: Cloud Computing’ is the current buzz word that seems to have gotten the attention of the entire computing industry.

The innovations from technology vendors like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have a major impact and influence on enterprises that strive to compete. Enterprises are left with no choice but to compete. This phenomenon remains central to an enterprise, and definitely has an impact on the way they position their IT.

This is one of the external factors influencing IT. Between all these, ‘Enterprise Integration’ still remains as the ubiquitous core challenge.

In such an era, ‘Distributed Computing’ has helped enterprises overhaul over the years in thinking of hosting software on the cloud. It has enabled the transition of enterprises to cloud computing in a constantly evolving technology environment.

Incredible innovation has taken place in the area of distributed computing. Enterprises faced numerous challenges of interoperability and heterogeneous integration of multiple programs to a state where SOA has now enabled software to collaborate and address most of the enterprise integration challenges.

This has been the era of consumers, and in a consumer-driven market it is of central importance to provide on-demand services, be it financial transactions or requests for information. Some of the key challenges for enterprises meeting the needs of a consumer led surrounding are as follows:

1. Identity and Access Management
User identity is the culmination of an end user’s presence in an application. The ideal scenario is to have a single identity that provides access to any and all of the systems the end user accesses. This is a definite architectural and implementation challenge that an enterprise faces with its legacy of applications.

The ideal scenario is where mission critical applications can recognize a user identity with single id and password which looks difficult in a distributed computing culture. Some such challenges are faced by enterprises in the process of transition to cloud computing environment. Users still demand accessibility of applications with one identity management.