Increasingly, IT organizations will move from providing IT services locally to becoming an integrator of IT services--some provided locally and others provided outside the institution. As a result, institutions must immediately begin to plan for shared services and must understand the essential role that identity management and trust services play in making integration possible. In the last five years, institutions have begun to effectively utilize external services for mission-critical needs through an evolving set of standards and technologies, namely (1) Virtualization; (2) eXtensible Markup Language (XML); (3) Web 2.0 technologies; and (4) Network bandwidth cost reduction. These four components make it possible for external service providers to offer cost-effective and compelling hosted services. But it is important to recognize that these technologies have enabled service providers--not service consumers. The challenge for IT organizations is to integrate these disparate services in a coherent and effective manner. Issues such as authentication, access control, and the user experience in moving from one hosted service to another are all important factors for long-term success. What has been missing is a way for institutions to quickly and effectively integrate these external service offerings. To support both local and external service-delivery models, institutions need a comprehensive approach to identity management and trust services--an approach that allows external service providers to leverage campus identity management and trust services. This comprehensive approach should focus on three activities: (1) developing an identity management system; (2) creating a standard set of attributes for each person; and (3) enabling external access through a federation such as InCommon. Through these three activities, institutions can work with local and external service providers to create a common standards-based approach to authentication. In this article, the authors provide a more detailed explanation of how these three activities fit together. (Contains 1 figure and 8 notes.)