Pushpalanka's Blog

When the companies bring in external users to work within the enterprise activities, via mergers, acquisitions, outsourcing and allowing end users come via social login, a problem is raised due to the variety of protocols each of these external parties may use for identity management. Most of the time these external parties would not agree to share their user base with sensitive information of the users, which is a major asset of them. In this case identity federation or cross domain authentication comes into provide a solution to this problem. There are identity federation protocols that have evolved with the time mainly OpenID, SAML, WS-Federation and OpenID connect to address the requirement of federated authentication. Even though these protocols have been able to cater for it, while the acquisitions and merges grows up in numbers the solutions still suffers from two major limitations, namely[1], Federation Silos When there is federation requirement, organizations would...

When a business needs a rapid growth or a new technology integrated, partnering and acquiring strategies are commonly put forward. WhatsApp been acquired by Facebook, Skype been acquired by Microsoft are such popular acquisitions done by the giants in the industry. According to the Wall Street Journal “2015 the biggest year ever for mergers and acquisitions” globally[1]. When this is considered from the aspects of enterprise identity management, it means the rapid merge of external users to current enterprise system. While this merge needs to happen rapidly in order to take the competitive advantage, privacy and security aspects cannot be ignored. Quocirca which is a primary research and analysis company also confirms that “many businesses now have more external users than internal ones. Many organisations are putting in place advanced identity and access management tools to facilitate the administration and security issues raised by this.”[2].  The impact of these merges and...

Identity mediation for enterprise identity bus from Pushpalanka Jayawardhana

As identified and predicted by several prominent analyst firms(Forrester, Gartner) , acquiring and merging has been the frequent mechanism for enterprises to expand in the recent past and the years to come. With this expansion there is a rising need for enterprises to handle the enterprise across identity and access management procedures in a secured way that is fast enough to have the competitive advantage of the merged or acquired assets. With different enterprises having variety of standards and protocols in use for identity and access management, catering for this requirement is absolutely challenging given the time factor. A similar situation has been addressed by Enterprise Service Bus(ESB) concept few years back, when the requirements raised to mediate between different transport protocols and data formats when communication is required between disparate enterprise systems that are legacy and modern. We are trying to apply the same concepts around ESB in the arena of identit...