​Single Sign On

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Normally, at any business the user has to login every time he or she wants to enter a website or business application. Usually, this requires multiple passwords, and the constant logins are frustrating. Forgotten passwords or writing them down on note paper creates more chances of security breaches, and costs management additional money. Any way you look at it, the situation is not good.

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The solution is single sign on (SSO), or the capability to login only once, and gain admission to numerous applications, simultaneously. It automatically maintains the user’s session, regardless of the workstation, or even if they travel.
 

While there are five kinds of SSO solutions, Federated Sign On is only being discussed.

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Federation

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Federation is a concept based on interorganizational trust. Federated sign on means the authentication undertaking is entrusted to another party.

 

The trusting company must be confident the trusted business has comparable policies, ethics, and goals, and they are all followed. As long as the user has been validated by a federated authentication infrastructure constituent, the other party doesn’t need to sign on again
 

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Fine grained Entitlements

Entitlements are a set of characteristics that stipulate the access rights and privileges of an authenticated user.

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Fine grained Entitlements take it a step further than authentication. Normally, you are focused on who is permitted access into an application or network. With entitlement management the concentration changes to who is allowed to do what once they are in the application or network. Entitlements are built into each application a business has. They are used to support security of web services and applications, legacy applications, documents, files and physical security structures. It enables the user security and flexibility to collaborate.

 

By taking advantage of Fine grained entitlements, you can universally oversee entitlements throughout various business applications. You wouldn’t need to hard code entitlements rationality inside each application. Entitlements can be centrally controlled. This will guarantee more dexterity and plasticity in applications.

 

What’s more, this methodology provides for firmer, and more refined security, specific to users’ needs.

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Role Management

 

Role management is a major element in dealing with governance and compliance agreements for user access to a company’s data and information.

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Roles maintain compliance by affiliating access dispensations to job functions, and by granting business connotation to subordinate entitlements, for review by managers and compliance staff.

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Businesses are challenged because the number of roles demarcated is much greater than the amount that is ideal for them. Quite often, the number of roles is greater than the number of users. This is the result of not having a universal governance policy to characterize roles, and they are created anytime users need access to different applications and systems. Creating a thorough and accurate set of roles is one of the most essential, but challenging missions in executing role based access control. This is called role engineering, and found as one of the most expensive elements in achieving privilege management.

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Two approaches of role engineering exist; top-down and bottom-up. Top-down starts with describing a specific job function, then establishing a role for the job function by correlating needed permissions. It’s very difficult because there are often masses of business processes, thousands of users, and millions of authorizations. Depending only on a top-down method usually isn’t feasible.

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However, the bottom-up technique uses assigned permissions that already exist to devise roles. The bottom-up way aggregates present permissions into roles.

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