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Problem
A national university
faced the problem of identity management and control for its various and
complex communities of students, ex-alumni, and professors, who needed to
access a number of growing internal web applications. The management of
multiple resource dispersed identities was very expensive and complicated
due to the fact that the user access, authorization, and authentication
mechanisms were different for each application, which caused a complex,
redundant, insecure, and expensive environment.
The business problems
to be resolved were the following:
- Provide a secure central access mechanism for
the University’s communities (students, ex-alumni, professors).
- Obtain a unique point of access under the SSO
(single sign-on) concept to the multiple Web applications in the
institution.
- Increase the level of security through
physical authentication devices.
Solution
Starting off with the
security and academic mobility requirements of the institution, a solution
was designed to allow access to the available resources in the university,
restricting only to those users with privileges for them. This was obtained
through the instrumentation of business rules in personalized
authentication modules, as well as the incorporation of a digital
certificate stored in a token assigned to users.
Applying the virtual
private environment concept and reference frameworks of QoS Labs, several
applications of the institution were integrated which allowed access to the
university’s information resources from anywhere in the World (for example,
researchers in France and Spain), as well as the ability to access all
resources according to the privileges given by user profile and by authenticating
only once in the system (single sign-on)
Today, the department
who manages the solution is in a phase of delivering access tokens
massively. This is a stage of 5,000 initial users, with a goal to take it
to 350,000 users. Additionally, there are negotiations with other
management units for the incorporation of more applications to the identity
portal.
Technology and/or tools used
The solution used Sun
Microsystems’ access management and portal software products, implementing
the following components:
- Sun Java System Directory Server
- Sun Java System Access Manager
- Sun Java System Portal Server
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