Patent ID: 8166108

Claim:
A method for uniquely identifying assets in a federation comprising a plurality of distributed platforms that each operate a set of servers for serving at least some of said assets, the method comprising: at a first distributed platform of the plurality of distributed platforms, providing an interface for a customer of the first distributed platform to specify an alias to identify assets of the customer that are to be served by a server that is operated by a second distributed platform; verifying by the first distributed platform that said alias is unique with respect to other aliases that have been configured to identify assets of other customers whose assets are served by the set of servers operated by the second distributed platform; configuring said alias into a traffic management server of the first distributed platform to identify assets of said customer when said alias is unique relative to the other aliases that have been configured to identify the assets that are served by the set of servers operated by the second distributed platform; and preventing configuration of said alias when said alias is not unique relative to the other aliases that have been configured to identify the assets that are served by the set of servers operated by the second distributed platform.