Having the ability to rapidly search, identify and verify users accessing critical system resources is an absolute critical aspect of meeting security and compliance requirements for your organization. Identity Access Management (IAM) can provide detailed insight and added dimension of visibility within your organization that is correlated through the entire access management lifecycle. It empowers your organization to reduce IT costs, mitigate overall security risks, enable new business opportunities and deliver continuous regulatory compliance.
Identity Access Management comprises of four main components; Authentication, Authorization, User Management and Central User Repository. Its goal is to provide the right level of access to respective authorized users in order to protect information resources.
Identity Administration, Provisioning and Access management that is integrated with your IT service or helpdesk; assigning roles, resources and access privileges through profiles within your directory servers are all key parts of any IAM design and deployment phase. Providing Single Sign On features where already authenticated users can access multiple set of resources without having to authenticate again is also a subset feature of IAM.
With mission critical business applications such as ERP, SAP, CRM, SCM, Web Services requiring user access from numerous platforms; smartphones, corporate endpoints, personal computers and tablets along with users accessing such resources from any location whether from the internal corporate network or from the airport WLAN hotspot, an IAM solution will help your organization consolidate and manage user access profiles, whilst giving your security administrators complete visibility and awareness on access control.
Federated Identity Access Control and Single Sign On are some of the key specialized solutions M INTERGRAPH can offer your organization to meet your access control requirements. At M INTERGRAPH we ensure system integration is at the forefront of an IAM design process and build our project delivery lifecycle around it.
Federated Identity Access Control enables your organization to have a common set of security policies, access profiles, practices and communication protocols in place to manage the identity and trust of IT users and endpoints. Federated Identity Access Control allows users to reuse electronic identities across distributed enterprise architecture whilst maintaining security trust and posture level; saving administrators redundant work in maintaining user accounts.
With Federated Identity Access Control, organizations are able to federate user identities and access profiles across distributed enterprise architectures that are working in security silos. Enabling user identity portability and access privileges across autonomous security domains. The ultimate goal of identity federation is to enable users of one domain to securely access data or systems of another domain seamlessly, and without the need for completely redundant user administration. Identity federation comes in many flavors, including “user-controlled” or “user-centric” scenarios, as well as enterprise controlled or B2B scenarios.
Federation is enabled through the use of open industry standards, such that multiple vendors and solutions can achieve interoperability for common use cases. Trusted Network Computing Group has developed such an open standardized protocol IF-MAP (Interface for Metadata Access Point) that allows this exact federation across diverse enterprise systems. Use-cases involve things such as cross-domain access, web-based single sign-on, cross-domain user account provisioning, cross-domain entitlement management and cross-domain user attribute exchange
Use of identity federation can reduce cost by eliminating the need to scale one-off or proprietary solutions whilst also centralizing security policies that can be dynamically allocated across distributed environments. It can increase security and lower risk by enabling an organization to identify and authenticate a user once, and then use that identity information across multiple systems, including external partner websites. It can improve privacy compliance by allowing the user to control what information is shared, or by limiting the amount of information shared. And lastly, it can drastically improve the end-user experience by eliminating the need for new account registration through automatic “federated provisioning” or the need to redundantly login through cross-domain single sign-on.
M Intergraph solution can provide consulting services on Federated Identity Access Control technologies, help you understand where federation can assist your organization in improving your overall user identity management and maintaining a consistent security profile.
Single sign-on (SSO) is related to Federated Identity Access, where a user’s authentication process is made available across multiple distributed systems or even organizations. SSO is a subset of Federated Identity Management, as it relates only to authentication and is understood on the level of technical interoperability.
SSO is a session/user authentication process that permits a user to enter one name and password in order to access multiple applications. The process authenticates the user for all the applications they have been given rights to and eliminates further prompts when they switch applications or networks during a particular session.
SSO introduces many benefits;
M Intergraph Solution can provide the right consulting services to enable your organization to select the right SSO and Federated Access Management Solutions, develop an Identity Access Management framework and translate the framework into an operational service.