Tag: IDaaS

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More and more vendors are taking what they classically sold as an on premise solution and delivering their applications via the cloud.  While this makes a lot of sense both for the vendors as well as their customers, it does introduce a problem with authenticating users.  With the on premise solutions, they likely used Windows Integrated authentication for web applications to seamlessly log the customer’s users into their web application or they simply authenticated using the customers on premise Active Directory. ...

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Before diving into the benefits of a cloud federation (SAML or WS-Federation) broker, let me first cover what it is.  You can think of a cloud federation broker as a gateway or proxy server that all federation request go through.  Optimal IdM’s federation broker (The OptimalCloud) is a cloud service that contains one or more trusts to an on premise Identity Provider (IdP) or trust to a customer/business partner, which users authenticate with their local credentials, and a trust for each federated application (both on premise and cloud hosted applications), see picture below.   The main benefit for this federation model, is to limit the administration burden of the corporate IT staff in terms of supporting the future of hundreds and even thousands of federated applications that are currently being deployed or will be deployed.  In this case, the IT staff is constantly having to work with each and every application team to setup and troubleshoot that application roll-out. With the federation broker, all of that administration is done by the cloud broker staff at Optimal IdM.  The central IT staff only has to setup the trust with the broker for their IdP, then provide documentation to each application team with instructions on how to integrate with the cloud broker.  The typical cost of this solution is less than 1 full-time employee, but the benefits are far reaching that include the following: ...