Future of Identity and Access Management (IAM)

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 acquisitions are been predicted by the reputed analyst firm Gartner, as “By 2020, 60% of digital identities interacting with the enterprise will come from external identity providers through a competitive marketplace – up from less than 10% today.”[3]. Quocirca further discuss this topic with relation to BYOID concept, where the users may produce these identity via an external identity provider that enterprise would trust. These external identity providers might be using different protocols (legacy, proprietary, standard based) to deal with identities. Hence integrating these with existing systems is a challenge as sometimes full replacement of those legacy systems is often difficult or even impossible and this is dealing with a more sensitive part of enterprise security. As a solution for this foreseen rising requirement for enterprise in IAM arena, industry is investigating on several solutions. While some has been evaluating on the possibility of using an ESB itself for the purpose, a new concept has also been emerged as EIB which is specifically focusing on identity mediation.

Apart from enterprises growing with mergers and acquisition, if a new enterprise is concerned, most of the time, users had to register there, filling a lengthy form. But with the application of BYOID concept, it is opening doors to easily attract a whole user base of social identity providers. For example if a website is concerned which allows to login via Google or Facebook, it is having a possible user base as large as Google users+Facebook users when compared to a website that allows login for own registered users. In order achieve this kind of external identity provider integration, there needs to be a mechanism to securely confirm the user's’ identity and submit the decision in a mutually understandable way. For this there needs to be a transformation happening in between the two parties, which can be identified as the main functionality of an EIB.

With above facts it is evident that identity mediation is a requirement for enterprises in the coming up days, due to high rate of mergers, acquisitions happening and the possible competitive advantage of supporting login via the submission of a social identity. Also with the newly emerging technologies like IoT, many new protocols may be introduced to interact with identities and current protocols might get new version with several modifications. Time is critical factor for the enterprise when adapting new technologies and faster they move, more the benefits. Requirement that is given rise in this situation is an Identity Mediation mechanism that can do the transformation between identity protocols, similar to how ESBs transform messages between different transport protocols.


[1] - M. Farrell, "2015 Becomes the Biggest M&A Year Ever", WSJ, 2016. [Online]. Available: http://www.wsj.com/articles/2015-becomes-the-biggest-m-a-year-ever-1449187101. [Accessed: 24- Jan- 2016].


[2] - Quocirca.com, "Identity, access management and the rise of bring your own identity | quocirca.com", 2013. [Online]. Available: http://quocirca.com/article/identity-access-management-and-rise-bring-your-own-identity. [Accessed: 24- Jan- 2016].


[3] - D. Atkinson, "A Report From Inside the Gartner Identity and Access Management Summit", Top Identity & Access Management Software, Vendors, Products, Solutions, & Services, 2014. [Online]. Available: http://solutions-review.com/identity-management/a-report-from-inside-the-gartner-identity-and-access-management-summit/. [Accessed: 24- Jan- 2016].

Popular posts from this blog

Signing SOAP Messages - Generation of Enveloped XML Signatures

Image
Digital signing is a widely used mechanism to make digital contents authentic. By producing a digital signature for some content, we can let another party capable of validating that content. It can provide a guarantee that, is not altered after we signed it, with this validation. With this sample I am to share how to generate the a signature for SOAP envelope. But of course this is valid for any other content signing as well. Here, I will sign The SOAP envelope itself An attachment  Place the signature inside SOAP header  With the placement of signature inside the SOAP header which is also signed by the signature, this becomes a demonstration of enveloped signature. I am using Apache Santuario library for signing. Following is the code segment I used. I have shared the complete sample here to to be downloaded . public static void main(String unused[]) throws Exception {         String keystoreType = "JKS";         String keystoreFile = "src/main/resour
Read more

How to convert WSDL to Java

Image
Background Basically WSDL (Web Services Development Language) is an XML document used to describe or locate web services. WSDL stands for Web Services Description Language. The document describes a Web service. It specifies the location of the service and the operations that can be taken.  WSDL2Java is distributed with Axis2 package of Apache and need to set-up Axis2 to use this service. A  guide to set-up Axis2  can be found in apache organization documents .WSDL 2.0 is the currently using version. Obviously JDK should be properly installed too. Note: For the 3rd method you are not needed to set these things by yourself. The WSDL document includes server Java programs for Web services and generated classes using WSDL2Java feature includes client stubs, server skeletons and data types that can help in writing client side. The generated stub classes play a great role in distributed computing and if you are interested can read on  what are stub classes . In brief talking, 
Read more

How to Write a Custom User Store Manager - WSO2 Identity Server 4.5.0

Image
With this post I will be demonstrating writing a simple custom user store manager for WSO2 Carbon and specifically in WSO2 Identity Server 4.5.0 which is released recently. The Content is as follows, Use case Writing the custom User Store Manager Configuration in Identity Server You can download the sample here. Use Case By default WSO2 Carbon has four implementations of User Store Managers as follows. org.wso2.carbon.user.core.jdbc.JDBCUserStoreManager org.wso2.carbon.user.core.ldap.ReadOnlyLDAPUserStoreManager org.wso2.carbon.user.core.ldap.ReadWriteLDAPUserStoreManager org.wso2.carbon.user.core.ldap.ActiveDirectoryLDAPUserStoreManager Let's look at a scenario where a company has a simple user store where they have kept customer_id, customer_name and the password (For the moment let's not worry about salting etc. as purpose is to demonstrate getting a custom user store into action). So the company may want to keep this as it is, as there may be other serv
Read more