Federated Identity and
Hybrid Cloud Identity Management

Do you need to collaborate with your customers and business partners?

Do your employees access payroll, benefits, or other services from an external vendor?

Are you planning your cloud services strategy?

The urgency to adopt hosted services and the need to collaborate with external partners is growing every day.Business units need to work with vendors and partners to accomplish corporate goals and they don’t always wait for IT to authorize or implement solutions. A comprehensive strategy for external authentication and authorization is needed to stop the proliferation of ad-hoc solutions for supporting critical business functions. Hosted solution providers often require you to send them sensitive employee or customer data and access to hosted solutions often require users to remember an additional username and password. Enterprises are faced with difficult choices between investing in authentication and authorization infrastructure for software and services running on premise or making those same investments for new workloads in the cloud.

Explore the Option of Federated Identity

Identity federation eliminates the need for you to manage accounts and passwords for vendors and customers accessing your services. It also eliminates the need for your employees to use separate usernames and passwords when accessing hosted solutions or platforms such as Microsoft® Office 365. New applications can be written to leverage identity federation and claims-based access. These application workloads are easily moved from on premise to the cloud or between cloud platform providers because they are no longer tied to a specific identity or directory. Microsoft® Active Directory® Federation Services (AD FS) helps enterprises build claims-based identity and federation solutions – overcoming limitations of existing directory boundaries. Customer-focused services can benefit from federated identity by allowing customers to use existing accounts from Windows Live, Gmail, or Facebook.

Implement Federated Identity & Hybrid Cloud Solutions with Confidence

Orcas Consulting’s project experience, technical expertise, and engagement methodology ensure successful delivery of our solutions. All Orcas engagements follow a straightforward engagement methodology that should be familiar to our enterprise customers. A typical Federated Identity or Hybrid Cloud engagement would include the following phases and tasks:
Plan & Analyze – Your existing hosted and on-premise applications are examined. Future application needs are assessed. Your goals and objectives are clearly defined. Project scope and technical approach are agreed. Roles and responsibilities are assigned. A schedule is developed.
Design – Functional requirements are agreed and documented. Solution architecture is developed. An enterprise claims library is developed. A federation strategy is developed for each application or service.
Build – Federation platform is built and verified in a pre-production environment. Configuration and operations documentation is created. Test cases are written.
Test – The solution is tested for functionality and performance. Integration testing is performed with applications that are hosted on premise and the cloud. Configurations are adjusted to meet goals.
Deploy – Technology is released in production. Deployment issues are resolved.
Stabilize – Operational guidelines and documentation are tweaked. Solution is turned over to customer.