SAML: The Secret to Centralized Identity Management
The term that covers many of these issues is called identity management, and the CIO asked my team to look into the situation to see if we could improve it.
Identity management refers to provisioning, password management, and access control. Typically, access rights are stored in different locations, with separate access-control lists for individual applications and resources. Identity management must control data, people, and resources that are distributed across different locations. Historically, a multitude of separate systems handle identity management functions. For example, one program handles provisioning, another manages passwords, LDAP stores authentication information, and each application (or administrator) maintains individual user access-control lists. Keeping these separate functions maintained, synchronized, and up to date is a resource-intensive, costly proposition.
The link for this article located at Hank Simon is no longer available.