So in my previous posts I’ve discussed a couple of key points in what I define as the basic principles of Identity and Access Management;
- Requirements
- Source
- The Vault
- And as a side topic the DEA
Now that we have all the information needed, we can start to look at your target systems. Now in the simplest terms this could be your local Active Directory (Authentication Domain), but this could be anything, and with the adoption of cloud services, often these target systems are what drives the need for robust IAM services.
Something that we are often asked as IAM consultants is why. Why should the corporate applications be integrated with any IAM Service, and these are valid questions. Sometimes depending on what the system is and what it does, integrating with an IAM system isn’t a practical solution, but more often there are many benefits to having your applications integrated with and IAM system. These benefits include:
- Automated account provisioning
- Data consistency
- If supported Central Authentication services
Requirements
With any target system much like the 
IAM system itself, the one thing you must know before you go into any detail are the requirements. Every target system will have individual requirements. Some could be as simple as just needing basic information, first name, last name and date of birth. But for most applications there is allot more to it, and the requirements will be derived largely by the application vendor, and to a lessor extent the application owners and business requirements.
IAM Systems are for the most part extremely flexible in what they can do, they are built to be customized to an enormous degree, and the target systems used by the business will play a large part in determining the amount of customisations within the IAM system.
This could be as simple as requiring additional attributes that are not standard within both the IAM system and your source systems, or could also be the way in which you want the IAM system to interact with the application i.e. utilising web services and building custom Management Agents to connect and synchronise data sets between.
But the root of all this data is when using an IAM system you are having a constant flow of data that is all stored within the “Vault”. This helps ensure that any changes to a user is flowed to all systems, and not just the phone book, it also ensures that any changes are tracked through governance processes that have been established and implemented as part of the IAM System. Changes made to a users’ identity information within a target application can be easily identified, to the point of saying this change was made on this date/time because a change to this persons’ data occurred within the HR system at this time.
Integration
Most IAM systems will have management agents or connectors (the phases can vary depending on the vendor you use) built for the typical “Out of Box” systems, and these will for the most part satisfy the requirements of many so you don’t tend to have to worry so much about that, but if you have “bespoke” systems that have been developed and built up over the years for your business then this is where the custom management agents would play a key part, and how they are built will depend on the applications themselves, in a Microsoft IAM Service the custom management agents would be done using an Extensible Connectivity Management Agent (ECMA). How you would build and develop management agents for FIM or MIM is quite an extensive discussion and something that would be better off in a separate post.
One of the “sticky” points here is that most of the time in order to integrate applications, you need to have elevated access to the applications back end to be able to populate data to and pull data from the application, but the way this is done through any IAM system is through specific service accounts that are restricted to only perform the functions of the applications.
Authentication and SSO
Application integration is something seen to tighten the security of the data and access to applications being controlled through various mechanisms, authentication plays a large part in the IAM process.
During the provisioning process, passwords are usually set when an account is created. This is either through using random password generators (preferred), or setting a specific temporary password. When doing this though, it’s always done with the intent of the user resetting their password when they first logon. The Self Service functionality that can be introduced to do this enables the user to reset their password without ever having to know what the initial password was.
Depending on the application, separate passwords might be created that need to be managed. In most cases IAM consultants/architects will try and minimise this to not being required at all, but this isn’t always the case. In these situations, the IAM System has methods to manage this as well. In the Microsoft space this is something that can be controlled through Password Synchronisation using the “Password Change Notification Service” (PCNS) this basically means that if a user changes their main password that change can be propagated to all the systems that have separate passwords.
Most applications today use standard LDAP authentication to provide access to there application services, this enables the password management process to be much simpler. Cloud Services however generally need to be setup to do one of two things.
- Store local passwords
- Utilise Single Sign-On Services (SSO)
SSO uses standards based protocols to allow users to authenticate to applications with managed accounts and credentials which you control. Examples of these standard protocols are the likes of SAML, oAuth, WS-Fed/WS-Trust and many more.
There is a growing shift in the industry for these to be cloud services however, being the likes of Microsoft Azure Active Directory, or any number of other services that are available today.
The obvious benefit of SSO is that you have a single username or password to remember, this also greatly reduces the security risk that your business has from and auditing and compliance perspective having a single authentication directory can help reduce the overall exposure your business has to compromise from external or internal threats.
Well that about wraps it up, IAM for the most part is an enabler, it enables your business to be adequately prepared for the consumption of Cloud services and cloud enablement, which can help reduce the overall IT spend your business has over the coming years. But one thing I think I’ve highlighted throughout this particular series is requirements requirements requirements… repetitive I know, but for IAM so crucially important.
If you have any questions about this post or any of my others please feel free to drop a comment or contact me directly.