Trustgenix last week released a simplified version of its server for sharing identities among companies that is designed to let users easily integrate partners into their infrastructure for access control.
The company’s new IdentityBridge Standard Edition acts as an endpoint in a hub-and-spoke model for integrating identity information between companies – so-called identity federation. Trustgenix is offering the Standard Edition as an easy way for larger companies that have adopted standards-based federation servers – such as Trustgenix’s IdentityBridge Enterprise Edition – to expand their realms with their smaller or less tech-savvy partners to create single sign-on capabilities to Web-based applications.
The Standard Edition has been stripped of many of the features present in the Enterprise Edition, which allows for a simple wizard based setup and configuration. For example, the Standard Edition is only able to relay identity information to the hub of the identity federation and cannot accept any requests for access.
IBM is offering a similar model based on an alliance it made last year with PingID, where the PingFederate server can be deployed in smaller companies looking to share identity information for access control with larger partners running Tivoli Federated Identity Manager.
While companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, RSA Security, Sun and Ping are touting federation, user adoption is in its infancy. Gartner estimates that only 5% of organizations have active federation deployments in place or are ready to roll out the technology this year.
“The federation ‘poster children’ are relatively few, and often their partners are not ready to federate yet,” says Ray Wagner, research vice president for information security and privacy at Gartner. IdentityBridge Standard Edition runs on Windows Server 2000 and 2003 and requires the use of Microsoft Internet Information Services version 5 or 6. It also integrates with Microsoft’s Active Directory or directories that support the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol.
As part of the IdentityBridge installation, users input the URL that is the access point to their partner’s network, and the setup wizard returns an alias URL that can be displayed on a portal application. When end users click that URL, the request is redirected through the Standard Edition server, which asks for identity information such as a user name and password. It then exchanges that identity information with the partner site.
The upside is that each organization manages and maintains its own user data.
The IdentityBridge Standard Edition supports standard federation protocols, including the Security Assertion Markup Language 1.0 and 1.1 and the Liberty Alliance specification 1.1 and 1.2. Support for SAML 2.0, is planned for this summer.
IdentityBridge Standard Edition costs $5,000 for one server with an unlimited number of users.
