Federation

Today, the pressure is greater than ever on companies to bring to market new service offerings that will generate significant revenue - quickly, securely, and cost-efficiently. Many companies are partnering to incorporate secondary services into their primary consumer and business offerings, but doing so requires a security, privacy, and identity management strategy that matches the pace of business innovation. Organizations must provide the answers to some crucial questions when determining how to deliver partner-driven services. How does a company collaborate securely and consistently with each of the partners it needs to stay competitive? And how does that company maintain the security and privacy expected by customers when incorporating third-party services from partners?

Increasingly, the answers lie in federation, a technology framework for sharing information with partners and delivering services securely to customers across domains. Until now, federated security has focused largely on linking the internal infrastructures of the companies delivering primary services - the wireless operators, financial services companies, and other hubs - with service providers and other spoke companies that deliver secondary services into larger offerings. Federation solutions that extend the frameworks for provisioning, authentication, authorization, and Web services enablement to partners are required to permit secure interactions with these partners. Unfortunately, what’s been missing from federation solutions so far is a simple, cost-effective way to extend key capabilities to an infinite number of service providers or other partners. To provide this, the solution must include a reusable mechanism to quickly and efficiently establish multiple trusted relationships within networks of partners and service providers.

Crescent Federation Management Solution helps accelerate the introduction of new, revenue-generating services by organizing hub-and-spoke partner networks into secure Trusted Domains. It allows companies to act as spokes, or service providers, by providing extensible, easy-to-deploy federation solutions.

Key features include:

• Simplified deployment into existing IT infrastructures
• Leveraging of the Trusted Domain’s hub for authentication, authorization, and security policies
• Support for all major federation protocols (SAML, Liberty)
• Repeatable integration for low-cost, rapid rollout to multiple partners