Using Identity as a Service to Extend and Enhance AD FS

On Demand

Many enterprises have chosen to deploy and use Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS), a Windows Server role, to provide users with single sign-on (SSO) access and federation to a variety of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. Working with AD FS in an environment where SaaS application use is growing dramatically—often without the IT department’s sanction or knowledge—presents a strong set of challenges for enterprises. Scaling AD FS to provide SSO to hundreds or thousands of SaaS applications in a timely manner, with a good user experience, is simply beyond the capabilities of many already-overburdened IT departments. This situation is a major reason why Identity as a Service (IDaaS) solutions have arisen. They offload the SaaS connection burden from the on-premises IT department to a subscription cloud service.

The good news is that organizations that have deployed AD FS do not have to start over. Enterprises can continue to use their existing AD FS solution as an identity bridge to a standards-based IDaaS solution that itself manages access to SaaS applications. The combination of these two solutions yields a variety of complementary benefits, including easier onboarding of new SaaS applications, user provisioning to the applications, scalability improvements, simplified management, and a user-friendly web-based portal to the applications.

This webinar will review AD FS’s history and capabilities as they have evolved as well as some gaps in the product’s current feature set. It will also outline where an IDaaS solution fits into an enterprise identity architecture. Finally, it will show how AD FS and IDaaS solutions can easily integrate with each other to provide your business with scalable, highly available, and user-friendly SSO access to SaaS applications.

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Presenters

Sean Deuby, technical director for Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Pro, has over 25 years' experience in enterprise IT. He began his IT career running Texas Instruments' IBM VM systems, then helped design, deploy, and support TI's first Windows NT 3.5 worldwide infrastructure. He spent 10 years with Intel Corporation, where he was one of the architects of Intel's corporate Active Directory forest and the design engineer of the directory services team. A longtime contributing editor before joining the magazine, Sean has written many articles and a book on Windows Server and Active Directory, and speaks on these topics at conferences around the world. Microsoft has awarded Sean the MVP (Most Valuable Professional) distinction for directory services every year since 2004.

Pamela Dingle is a Senior Technical Architect within the Office of the CTO at Ping Identity. Pamela has a long history with Identity Management, focusing on implementation, architecture and strategy over 10 years of evolution of systems such as directories, application servers, web access management systems, provisioning, and now federation. Pamela serves on the board of directors of the OpenID Foundation, and has in the past run the Pamela Project, an open source project for RP-enabling Information Card websites.