* Quest, Centrify integrate with ADFS to bring its benefits to non-Windows platforms
Last week I mentioned the decided benefits of Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) – the biggest reason to upgrade your Windows Server 2003 installations to R2. It’s a great way to allow access to your security domain from outside, for partners and clients. But, like almost all things Microsoft, it fails to account for non-Windows platforms.
Are there any non-Windows platforms on your network? Are there any on your partners’ networks? Your customers’ and clients’? Can you be sure that there won’t be any in the future?
Fortunately, the two companies that first made it possible for you to authenticate non-Windows platforms to Active Directory have kept pace and support ADFS. This means that Active Directory authentication, authorization and security for those outside your security domain can be handled in a fine-grained way no matter which platform they happen to be on.
Centrify’s DirectControl and Quest Software’s Vintela Authentication Services both integrate tightly with ADFS to bring its benefits to non-Windows platforms. I spoke with Centrify’s Tom Kemp and Quest’s Jackson Shaw at the recent Catalyst Conference and both were emphatic that ADFS is the best part of Windows Server 2003 R2.
Shaw noted that two of Quest’s products are currently taking advantage of R2. Vintela Authentication Services has always used the RFC 2307 (“An Approach for Using LDAP as a Network Information Service”) standard for storing Unix identity attributes in Active Directory. Microsoft has now embraced RFC 2307 in Windows Server 2003 R2. This means that customers using Vintela Authentication Services for cross-platform authentication are already Windows Server 2003 R2-ready and need make no changes to Vintela Authentication Services to benefit from Windows Server 2003 R2. In addition, Vintela Single Sign-on for Java has been updated to support the new ADFS capability in Windows Server 2003 R2. This provides a unified platform for identity management of Java and J2EE applications and services from the same Active Directory infrastructure used to provide single sign-on for Windows resources.
Kemp was not only ready to talk about Centrify’s use of ADFS, but was actively demonstrating it for anyone willing to stop by and look. The company even released a new product, DirectControl for Microsoft ADFS, just for the R2 release of Windows Server 2003. With it you can use Microsoft ADFS to provide secure, federated identity management for applications hosted on Apache and popular J2EE Web servers, including IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, JBoss, and Tomcat.
If there are multiple forests, multiple security domains, existing on or gaining access to your network you really need to upgrade your servers to R2. If there are any non-Windows platforms in that mix, you really need to seriously consider adding Quest’s or Centrify’s products to your tool kit.
