Authenticate Internally Once, Access Many Outside Apps
(Why read this? Because identity federation--or extending an identity outside an enterprise so it can access the enterprise's various partners logically and/or physically--is growing among vertical industries and via cloud computing. Ensuring that identity is really who it is thought to be is critical, which brings up strong authentication, which is an area in which business users, IT and physical security specialists should collaborate on solutions.)
Identity and password proliferation are painful for most users and enterprises, with password reset requests remaining big, frustrating business for help desks. Extend those problems beyond the enterprise domain out to trading partner systems and you have a situation ripe for disgruntled users, as BAE Systems can attest.
Employees of the big aerospace & defense firm were using applications from Herndon, Va.-based Exostar to share data with trading partners. However, it wasn't going as smoothly as it might. "The user experience was atrocious," said Malcolm Carrie, head of strategy and architecture in the corporate IT office at BAE Systems.
He said users disliked logging into the BAE Systems network using company credentials, then having to use completely different user ID and password formats to log in separately to Exostar's cloud-based Managed Access Gateway identity federation tool and/or external trading partner systems . Further, their unhappiness with the password situation was scaring off other internal prospective system users, said Carrie.
To solve the issue, BAE Systems recently deployed the Enterprise Access Gateway, a feature that's part of Exostar's Managed Access Gateway.
"Without the Enterprise Access Gateway, every access to every separate trading partner application was a separate authentication," said Carrie. Each authentication was determined by the trading partners' requirements, so there was no uniformity.
(Why read this? Because identity federation--or extending an identity outside an enterprise so it can access the enterprise's various partners logically and/or physically--is growing among vertical industries and via cloud computing. Ensuring that identity is really who it is thought to be is critical, which brings up strong authentication, which is an area in which business users, IT and physical security specialists should collaborate on solutions.)
Identity and password proliferation are painful for most users and enterprises, with password reset requests remaining big, frustrating business for help desks. Extend those problems beyond the enterprise domain out to trading partner systems and you have a situation ripe for disgruntled users, as BAE Systems can attest.
Employees of the big aerospace & defense firm were using applications from Herndon, Va.-based Exostar to share data with trading partners. However, it wasn't going as smoothly as it might. "The user experience was atrocious," said Malcolm Carrie, head of strategy and architecture in the corporate IT office at BAE Systems.
He said users disliked logging into the BAE Systems network using company credentials, then having to use completely different user ID and password formats to log in separately to Exostar's cloud-based Managed Access Gateway identity federation tool and/or external trading partner systems . Further, their unhappiness with the password situation was scaring off other internal prospective system users, said Carrie.
To solve the issue, BAE Systems recently deployed the Enterprise Access Gateway, a feature that's part of Exostar's Managed Access Gateway.
"Without the Enterprise Access Gateway, every access to every separate trading partner application was a separate authentication," said Carrie. Each authentication was determined by the trading partners' requirements, so there was no uniformity.
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