Im Internet of Things (IoT) werden bis zum Jahr 2020 voraussichtlich 26 Milliarden Geräte installiert sein. Anbieter von IoT-Produkten und - Services werden steigende Umsätze erzielen, die 2020 die Marke von 300  Mrd.  USD überschreiten werden. Dabei wird durch Verkäufe an unterschiedliche Endmärkte ein globaler Mehrwert von 1,9 Billionen USD geschaffen werden.

Das ist viel Geld, und Unternehmen wie die MUFG Union Bank, Nordstrom und Swisscom sorgen dafür, dass sie dank geeigneter Softwareanwendungen und -services in dieser neuen Realität ganz vorn dabei sind. Kunden über diese wachsenden Channels zu erreichen und ihre Erwartungen mit beeindruckenden Experiences zu erfüllen, wird für jedes erfolgreiche Unternehmen zur alltäglichen Praxis werden.

OAuth puts the user in control of delegating access to an API. This allows one service to integrate with another service on behalf of that user. The same social Web providers who popularized the pattern of exposing an API to enable third-party developers to enrich their platforms were the first ones to apply such delegated authorization mechanisms. OAuth was defined in 2006, to standardize mechanisms of this kind.

Mobility is taking today’s world by storm. By 2017, mobile apps will be downloaded more than 268 billion times, generating revenue of more than $77 billion — making apps one of the most popular computing tools for users across the globe. Understandably, the pressure to deliver diverse apps to external and internal audiences is felt universally across every enterprise.

The app, in many digital forms, mobile, cloud and the Internet of Things, has created the opportunity for enterprises to optimize interaction with employees, customers and business partners in fundamentally new ways. Choosing the right digital platform can be the difference between success and failure.

Across industry sectors, the boundaries of the traditional enterprise are blurring, as organizations open up their on-premise data and application functionality to partner organizations, the Web, mobile apps, smart devices and the cloud. APIs (application programming interfaces) form the foundation of this new open enterprise, allowing enterprises to reuse their existing information assets across organizational boundaries.

OAuth is an emerging Web standard for authorizing limited access to applications and data. It is designed so that users can grant restricted access to resources they own—such as pictures residing on a site like Flickr or SmugMug—to a third-party client like a photo printing site. In the past, it was common to ask the user to share their username and password with the client, a deceptively simple request masking unacceptable security risk. In contrast to this, OAuth promotes a least privilege model, allowing a user to grant limited access to their applications and data by issuing a token with limited capability.