IDENTITY CHALLENGE

• » Provide a web-based access management package with extensible authentication services

Overview:

A global financial services organization planned to roll out a web access management application to protect sensitive web applications and resources. The company has a significant investment in an enterprise authentication service, and the user base already knew how to use it. It made sense to keep the same system in place with its identity management strategy.

This presented a number of technical challenges:

• » The authentication service was already in production and could not be modified under any circumstance.

• » The identity management platform stored its user information in an LDAP directory service for identity and authentication services.

• » Tight integration would create a set of hard-to-manage dependencies, and would not make the integration effort reusable with new projects.

• » No synchronization solution would solve the authentication service issue.

Solution:

RadiantOne Identity and Context Virtualization Platform solves difficult authentication challenges by virtualizing existing data and layering an extensible set of services on top. The logical representation of data and the directory services based on that data are separate from the physical architecture. In other words, virtualization makes it possible to build a directory service out of any data, and add support for specific requirements by customizing the services provided.

With RadiantOne, architects can do per-branch customization of the authentication method. This made it easy to build a view for custom authentication requirements, and assign an extensible authentication method to it. When applications access the branch using standard LDAP, the customized authentication logic interfaces with the enterprise authentication service. This allows applications to work with the directory without modification to the application.

Since RadiantOne acts as a standard directory service, new applications can take advantage of the same view (or a new view can be created to handle additional requirements), making the integration effort reusable and strategically sound.

Results:

Using RadiantOne Identity and Context Virtualization Platform, this financial services company was able to address the requirements needed to use existing security and identity data in its identity management deployment. The result was a system delivered on time, ready to handle the initial design requirements easily, and positioned to accommodate future requirements as well.