Richard talks to Sean Deuby about Simple Cloud Identity Management (SCIM). SCIM is an evolving standard for simplifying federation of identity authentication and account information using common web-based protocols like REST and SAML. Sean talks about how services like Microsoft's Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) works fine for a handful of major cloud applications, but becomes a problem when the number of applications grows. SCIM looks to address this by simplifying the provisioning of identity services. You can read more about SCIM at http://www.simplecloud.info/ and Sean's article on SCIM at Windows IT Pro. Sean also mentions Ping Identity as a key driver behind SCIM and recommends watching a one hour webinar entitled SCIM: New Standard on the Block. It's early days for SCIM yet, but it's worth getting up to speed and asking your cloud vendors where their support for the standard is.