Identity Federation: Essential Building Block for a Winning Cloud Strategy in your SAP Environment

During this year´s European Identity Conference in Munich, we had a very interesting panel discussion with the title “It has become quiet around identity federation. Is this a good sign or a bad one?” We concluded the discussion with a clear yes – it is a good sign, as now we have passed the hype and have gone into the phase of implementation. Identity federation, now having become mature standard and having been implemented into many solutions available, even gains more momentum when it comes to adding cloud based services to your existing environment. Cloud computing and identity federation have in common, that they are business driven and process oriented, thus being a perfect fit for infrastructure.

In this webinar, Martin Kuppinger will give an overview on the current and future role of identity federation in hybrid cloud infrastructures with a focus on SAP environments. He will be followed by Keith Grayson from SAP, who will be talking on SAP user management optimization through SAML 2.0.

Flexibly Coupling IT Systems Inside and Outside your Company

We are now facing a period in IT, where “traditionally” deployed services will co-exist with cloud services, making it an absolute must, to embrace industry standards in a way that makes interaction with other companies, partners, customers, suppliers, an easy thing. The need for a maximum of flexibility, the capability to integrate with others without the ever same budget consuming integration overhead, is now stronger than ever. This seems to be exactly the scenario, in which identity federation is the ideal solution to create an identity layer throughout your ecosystem. Martin will give an overview on identity federation best practices and will describe, how an enterprise implementation strategy should look like.

Using Identity Federation to Optimise your SAP User Management

In the new world of IT where thought-leaders are embracing the concept of IT services being provided through a combination of cloud, on-demand and on-premise delivery models, there needs to be a way of maintaining and controlling Digital Identity seamlessly across all of these IT service environments. In addition, the applications in each environment must be able to accept the Digital Identity for both Authentication and Authorisation purposes. In adopting this multi-channel approach to IT services, organisations need to look at the challenge of Digital Identity from multiple points of view; the employee, the CIO, the CSO and internal and external audit functions, among others.

Standards-based Identity Federation is a way for organizations to maintain control over their user base, providing a central point of control and audit. Through the the adoption of SAML 2.0 by cloud, on-demand and on-premise enterprise applications for both authentication and authorization there is promise that;

• Digital identity is maintained centrally with no need to manage IT accounts in application siloes
• Dynamic, attribute-based authorization models eliminate the need to manage user authorizations in the applications
• User IT access rights are truly aligned with the business process and not bound by application siloes
• Leading to a Dramatic reduction in enterprise application user and authorization management tasks

This webinar discusses how you can enable your organization to take full advantage of the opportunities presented by the new IT delivery models, while keeping control of your IT users and their activities.