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Ian Glazer

Research VP, Agenda Manager

Ian.glazer@gartner.com

@iglazer

Looking at federation through enterprise eyes

Recent Past

Federation=

SSO

Hub and Spoke

Network of peers

Except

• Both hub and spoke, as well as, network of peers faced challenges scaling.- Some of these issues were technical.

- Some of these issues were value-related.

• Communities of interest formed to address both challenges.

Today's World

Enterprise federation today

• Majority of enterprises do not participate in federations per se.

• However, enterprises do use federation technologies to connect to externally-provided services.

• Federation found its enterprise stride via SaaS adoption.

Status Quo

Welcome SaaS and Its Friends

Welcome SaaS and Its Friends

Big shiny object!

Federation=

Way to attach SaaS to the enterprise

=SSO

Joining a Federation(The Short Version)

Sign business agreement

Except

• The business isn’t involved.

• Lawyers are involved.- Appropriate use of attributes and other information is a

legal agreement.

• Business expectations are assumed to be met but inherent value of the service.

Determine RP’s needs

Except

• This isn’t a dialogue.

• “Provide the following attributes.”

• But what about entitlements?

• But what about authorization policies?

Start building SAML metadata

Map local attributes to RPs entitlements

and attributes

Except

• These mappings are poorly documented

• Lots of tribal knowledge, less institutional knowledge

• Brittle mappings aren’t contextual friendly

Perform telekinesis

Perform telekinesis?

Action at a distance

Telekinesis

• Want to effect the authorizations in a remote system

• Provisioning local objects to effect remote authorization state

• But this is a hoax- Provision remote objects too

Spray old data everywhere

• Lots of attributes being pushed

• But now with less visibility!- RPs don’t know the quality of the data

- RPs don’t know the data’s “Sell By” date

- Information sources don’t always know where the data went

Today's Federated ProvisioningApproaches

How to Connect People toFederated/Cloud Apps?

How to Connect People toFederated/Cloud Apps?

?

Federation=

Way to attach SaaS to the enterprise

=SSO

Variety of techniques exist

• Broad spectrum of federated provisioning techniques- Manual one-off

- “Traditional”

- Creative

• Service providers lack consistency

Service Provider User Management Tools

• User management console:- Allows administrator to manually create and manage

user accounts and privileges

• Bulk load operations:- Most support .csv file uploads

• Integration tools:- Proprietary user management APIs

- Directory Synchronization

- Support for IAM standards such as LDAP, SAML, SPML, etc.

• User management console- Allows administrator to manually create and manage

user accounts and privileges

• Bulk load operations- Most support .csv file uploads

• Integration tools- Proprietary user management APIs

- Directory Synchronization

- Support for IAM standards such as LDAP, SAML, SPML, etc.

Majority

Service Provider User Management Tools

The select few

You Call This a Provisioning Tool?

You Call This a Provisioning Tool?

Yes!

Local Connector

A target application is just a target.

Cloud-Based Connector

Everything is better in the cloud?

To the Cloud With Your Provisioning Server

Directory Synchronization

Hosted

On-Premises

SaaS App Identity Repository

Sync Server Enterprise Identity Store (LDAP or AD)

User Attributes

Change Detection

Just-In-Time Provisioning via SAML

Welcome back!

Except

• All of these approaches only solve a portion of the problem:- Administrative authorization

- SSO

• What happens with attributes and entitlements that get pushed to the federation partner/service?

• The enterprise fixation with federated authentication is blinding it from the larger issues – federated authorization

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Administrative & runtime

authorization

Two Kinds of Authorization Policies

Administrative Policies

• Sets up attributes and entitlements needed to enable access

• Ahead of their use

• Provisioning

• Identity and access governance (IAG)

- Access policy management

- Role management

• In people’s heads

- Workflow as manually enforced policies

Where Do Administrative Policies Live?

• Authorizes user to perform an action based on context

• Context = attributes, entitlements, and external factors

Runtime Policies

• Applications

• Web access management

• Externalized authorization management

• Federated services

Where Do Runtime Policies Live?

Administrative Policy

... in Action

Runtime Policy

... in Action

Two Policies; One Goal

Attributes and Entitlements Dependencies

• Each type of policy is maintained by separate teams with separate change management processes

• Neither kind of policy is aware of the other

• The teams maintained these policies are usually disconnected as well

A Part and Yet Apart

• To completely answer who can do what, both administrative and runtime environments must be examined

• Lack of awareness and linkage of both environments prevents complete answers

• Disconnected policies inhibit traceability

• We do not know if we are faithfully fulfilling business controls

The Problem

Things don’t get better in a federated scenario

Brain surgery with Buckaroo Banzai

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No, no! Don’t tug on that.

You never know what it is attached to.

Manipulating attributes has unknown and unknowable consequences

Things don’t get better in a federated scenario

• Policy coherence is harder to achieve- Administrative policies are typically tribal in nature

- Runtime policies are tribal in nature… and maintained by a different tribe!

- Examining both sets of policies together is nearly impossible

• Federated SSO is not hard to establish- What happens after sign-on is crucial… and it is often

well out of sight of the IdP

59

Looking into the near future

New developments in federated provisioning

Cloud HR Is the Lifecycle Feed

Cloud Directory Is the New Lifecycle Feed

Token Flipper Is the New Lifecycle Feed

Token Flipper Is the New Connector

Multi-Protocol JIT

But all of these solutions

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will eventually fail.

Federation=

Way to attach SaaS to the enterprise

=SSO

Enterprise fixation with federated

authentication is blinding it from the

larger issue.

Federated Authorization

Shared Problems

Problems with our administrative tools

• Traditional on-premise administrative IAM tools are push-oriented.- These tools are “copy” not “reference” in nature.

• Policies should be provisioned, not attributed- Attributes should be referenced not copied.

• Authorization policies are increasingly split between administrative and run-time environments.

Problems with our runtime tools

• Runtime authorization environments often have opaque policies.- Hard to execute compliance-related activities.

• Attribute and entitlement meaning is inferred and codified in varying ways.

• What is acceptable use doesn’t always make it into the authorization policies.

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Problems with federated services

• There are inconsistent ways of discovering entitlements- And on-premise tools (especially IAG) don’t know to

deal with that

• Authorization policies is:- Sometimes managed by the enterprise

- Sometimes by the RP

- Sometimes both

- And not rationalized against administrative policies

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The problems beneath the problems

• Our models are insufficient- IAM tools do not model relationships well.

- IAM tools do not model context well.

• Authorization is a problem of relationship and context.- Federated authorization is more so

• We push attributes instead of pull them.

• We lack mechanisms to share, distributed, and link authorization policy.

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Calls to Action and Readings

What you should do: Know and Map

• Know your entitlements- An entitlement catalog transforms tribal knowledge into

institutional knowledge

• Know your authorization policies- Document authorization policies

- Try to close the gap between administrative and runtime authorization policies

• Map attribute dependencies- First step to addressing authorization policy coherence

is knowing where shared attribute dependencies exist.

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What can you do: Demand more

• Enterprises often lag higher education and federal governments in federation sophistication

• Vendors primarily selling to private enterprise will thus lag as well.

• Bulk load interface ≠ acceptable federation solution

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What we must do: Hasten evolution

• The industry needs to move from pushing attributes to pushing authorization policies.

• Relationships and context must become first-class citizens in the IAM world and its tools.

• The enterprise notion of federation as glorified SSO must evolve.

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Federation≠

Way to attach SaaS to the enterprise

≠SSO

Federation=

Authorization across boundaries

Recommended Gartner Reading

• Achieving Greater Control Over AuthorizationIan Glazer

• Combating Policy Sprawl: Identity and Access Governance and Externalized Authorization Management SystemsIan Glazer

• Upcoming - The Brave New World of FederationRobin Wilton

• Upcoming - Combating Policy Sprawl: Identity and Access Governance and Externalized Authorization Management SystemsMark Diodati

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