[midPoint] Per Identitam Ad Astra: We are Going Multiplanetary

[Evolveum Marketing]

Dear midPoint community,

Humanity has been exploring Mars since 1960. With its 38% gravity of the 
Earth’s, thin yet protective atmosphere and day-night rhythm very 
similar to ours, it is believed that Mars is one of Earth’s closest 
habitable neighbors in our solar system. Next logical step after Mars 
exploration is a permanent settlement and building new society. And with 
new society, new identity management and identity governance needs arise.

Thanks to midScale, a project funded by European Commission Initiative 
that significantly improves the scalability, midPoint is ready to go 
multiplanetary. Our plans move so much forward you need light years to 
measure the distance. Joining first expeditions, midPoint will provide 
essential infrastructure in the first colonies, and later countries on Mars.

Although the fluctuation among colonists on Mars is likely to be quite 
low, there is still a need to manage access permissions for variety of 
jobs and responsibilities in the colony. Every job is mission-critical.

There will be technological challenges. The Earth-Mars round-trip time 
varies between 6 minutes to 45 minutes. This is not entirely real-time 
communication. Fortunately, midPoint has pioneered asynchronous 
communication technology, being able to handle such long communication 
delays. Despite that, keeping databases synchronized across vast space 
distances is not going to be any easy task. However, midPoint has 
communicated with an assortment of legacy systems in the past, including 
some pieces that would shine in a museum collection. After such 
experience, deep space communication seems perfectly feasible.

There will be challenges, but there is also potential – especially in 
case that life on Mars is found. The scale of the identity management 
platform may need to grow substantially in that case. Even if life on 
Mars is not found, there still will be a lot of robotic identities to 
manage. As robots get more intelligent, they may develop a personality 
traits and talents, making the task of their management not unlike to 
task of managing people.

To greet the future completely, we are preparing midPoint to dive into 
the unknown and reach for the stars. Although the exact technologies of 
interstellar travel are not yet known, our architects are already 
preparing for the future. We are experimenting with a variety of 
potential futuristic technologies in our laboratories, to be ready at 
the time when they will be needed.

Our ambition goes beyond our galaxy. Milky Way is bound to collide with 
Andromeda Galaxy in about 4.5 billion years. This may provide some 
long-term potential, very likely bringing new identities that need to be 
managed.

We hope you are ready for the future, as the first human expedition is 
just years away from now!

(Reposted from Evolveum blog 
<https://evolveum.com/per-identitam-ad-astra-we-are-going-multiplanetary/>)

-- 

Veronika Kolpascikova
Marketing Specialist
evolveum.com

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