ViewDS Cobalt

Identity and Access Management (IAM) originated as monolithic, perimeter-focused enterprise systems with limited integration, relying on traditional identity stores and authentication/authorization protocols. As organizations expanded beyond business-to-employee needs into external use cases, federation and single sign-on enabled identities and access controls to span multiple systems and even multiple organizations, creating demand for standardized APIs to integrate across boundaries. Cloud adoption (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) accelerated this shift by emphasizing elasticity, scalability, and cost reduction, and encouraged IAM capabilities to be delivered through stateless protocols and RESTful APIs over HTTP/S, alongside standards such as OData and SCIM, OpenID Connect for authentication, and OAuth2 for authorization.

Cloud IAM must operate beyond firewalls, scale to millions of users and far more daily transactions, traverse complex infrastructure (e.g., firewalls and load balancers), and support multi-tenancy—contrasting with the typically single-tenant nature of many on-premises deployments. Most organizations now operate hybrid environments, increasing the need to integrate security across on-prem and cloud and to automate IAM as part of DevOps. This drives a growing market expectation that IAM capabilities be exposed and consumed via APIs to enable new business models, partner connectivity, and seamless user experiences.

ViewDS Cobalt is presented as a fully multi-tenant identity platform combining directory services, authentication, federation/SSO, fine-grained authorization, provisioning, and auditing. It features an extensible, replicated directory with advanced search and a graph database accessible via OData APIs, embedded synchronization/provisioning (including distributed sync to keep sensitive data on-premises), OpenID Connect and SAML (as both IdP and relying party), RBAC and ABAC using XACML internally, and robust auditing with CEF and export options. Its microservices, Docker-based architecture supports clustering, failover, scaling, and multi-cloud deployment, while key challenges include limited adaptive authentication, evolving web portals, and a smaller ecosystem.

• Core IAM building blocks include administration, authentication, authorization, and auditing.
• ViewDS is headquartered in Melbourne, Australia and has partners in the USA, Europe, and Asia.
• ViewDS customers span Australasia, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America, including government, defense, aviation, and health sectors.
• ViewDS Cobalt is a fully multi-tenant identity solution.
• Cobalt directory search supports phonetic matching, typo correction, acronym/abbreviation expansion, keyword, stemming, and synonym matching.
• Cobalt’s schema is extensible via API at runtime.
• Cobalt’s storage engine is used to build a graph database accessible through an OData API.
• Cobalt supports OpenID Connect and can operate as a SAML IdP for SSO to SAML-consuming services such as Salesforce or Office 365.
• Cobalt supports TOTP and PKI certificate-based authentication.
• Cobalt uses Docker containers and Hazelcast for automatic clustering and session management.

• “Historically, Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions were developed to address the business needs of IT environments running within the walls of their perimeter.”
• “The reality of today is that most organization’s IT data, applications and services are spread across both on-premises and cloud environments.”
• “The changing IT economic models are driving a change to expose and consume APIs.”
• “APIs will enable organizations to create new business models, connect with partners and customers while providing a seamless experience by linking systems and services together.”
• “Cobalt natively uses OpenID Connect to handle any OpenID connect flows such as username/passwords and social authentication like Twitter, Facebook, and Google…”
• “The Cobalt platform strongly supports dynamic authorization, and almost all of its policy-based decision-making uses XACML internally…”
• “Essentially, anything that changes within Cobalt can be logged and attribute-based policies are used to control what events are logged.”
• “The platform was also built using the microservice architectural pattern giving it flexibility in deployment.”
• “One of Cobalt’s unique capabilities is their API layer in which all of the Cobalt functionality is accessible and managed via APIs using the OData API framework.”
• “Adaptive authentication is a capability that customers are beginning to expect in their Identity products today, and adaptive authentication is missing from the ViewDS list of supported authentication methods.”