Identity Management in the Cloud

Submitted By: Sharon Simpson, Ongoing Operations

The Evolution of Single Sign-On – By Kyle Stutzman, Director Implementations, Testing and Level 3 Support

Many of you have looked at or possibly implemented a Single Sign-on (SSO) solution.  You know the problem, we have many services or systems that have little or no interconnected authentication or identity system. This leaves your internal staff managing authentication for each of the individual services and your users trying to manage multiple user names,passwords, and secondary authentication for each system.  I think this problem continues to expand as we move more and more into cloud based solutions with services outside our network perimeter.  If you already have a SSO solution or are looking at one I suggest staying familiar with Federated Identity Management (FIM) standards.

As cloud services become a larger part of our businesses making sure our SSO solution and cloud vendors work with these standards is important.  SAML and WS-Federation seem to be two primary standards that should be considered but there are also some newer developing standards to watch.  Finding the federation standard or standards that work for you and your vendors can lead to finding the right solution for internal and external identity management.

I’ve included a few links below that offer a basic FIM overview.

http://www.pingidentity.com/knowledge-center/SSO-and-Federated-Identity.cfm

http://www.authenticationworld.com/Authentication-Federation/

http://wiki.cloudsecurityalliance.org/guidance/index.php/Identity_and_Access_Management