Federated Identity Management

EMS-IC Federated Identity Management

There are many reasons to implement federation, but accomplishing SSO to reduce user name and password combinations when navigating multiple security domains is cited most often. Registering users prior to accessing partner sites is another burdensome process that may be remedied through federation. Enterprises can let users bypass the registration step by preloading necessary attributes before a user first accesses the partner site.

Federated Identity, also known as External SSO, eliminates the need for organizations and partners to manage accounts, passwords, and credentials for this external access through the use of Single Sign-On using existing internal credentials. Cost savings is a significant federation driver as well that utilizes a standardized, reusable infrastructure that can accommodate multiple associates and applications.

Federated identity management and Web services are uniquely intertwined, mutually reliant on each other, and are poised to finally solve a long-running problem in both IT and systems security. From e-business transactions over the Internet to logins for the employee HR portal, uniform access control and robust management tools are required to securely enable connectivity for customers, partners and employees. Yet user databases and access policies are often fragmented, requiring multiple logins for users and repetitive tasks for systems administrators.

In conclusion, federated identity management makes possible the vision of "identity as a service," where authentication and authorization functions are Web services available to any application in the enterprise SOA. Instead of installing agents and writing custom code, single sign-on enablement is now a matter of standards support. Federated identity management applies the concept of a federal system to the ever-present problem of access control, and by using Web services standards makes secure connectivity universal. In turn, Web services use federated identity management technology to secure business transactions. And that's how these two seemingly unrelated topics are deeply intertwined.

Benefits of using Federated Identity Management:

• Improve user experience and reduce user administration costs by using Federated Single Sign-On with customer, partner, agent and/or provider organizations
• Minimize application impact, through drop-in federation capability
• Attestation/Compliance Management
• Allow collaboration with a wide variety of partner organizations, through concurrent support for all leading Federated Single Sign-On protocols
• Integrate audit data collection and reporting
• Manage identity flow across services and deliver policy-based integrated security management
• Improve business compliance by helping to reduce security exposure
• Simplify administration of security in cross-enterprise business processes by delivering "security as services"
• Deliver policy based integrated security management for SOA Web Services