CTO Corner

DirectAxs Identity Management as a SaaS offering

DirectAxs is a unique approach to the crowding space of SaaS Identity Management. With more than a dozen Fortune 1000 customers, and deployments globally, the DirectAxs Identity and Risk Platform, takes a Best of Breed approach to providing Identity Management capabilities to Enterprises. Customers are seeing a significant reduction in the time to market (down to 6-12 weeks depending on the Identity Services purchased) and overall reduction in TCO by 200-350% with the solution. In addition, customers are able to seamlessly integrate their on-premise applications, internal directories and any major SaaS application they may have contracted with. All these integrations leverage widely adopted industry standards such as SPML, SAML, Oauth etc.

The DirectAxs solution leverages the best of the Identity Management stack and thus outweighs its competitors in its offering. For example, for Single Sign On, the DirectAxs solution is built on top of Forge Rock’s OpenAM. Similarly for Identity Management, the DirectAxs solution uses Oracle’s Identity Manager, and for roles and compliance it uses Oracle Identity Analytics.

DirectAxs’s unique IP include

• DirectAxs Identity Interceptor
• DirectAxs Administration and Management Portal

The DirectAxs Identity and Risk Platform runs on Amazon’s EC2 cloud and is offered in single and multi-tenants deployments. It is secured using Amazon’s VPC and a site to site VPN with the customer’s data center. The solution calls for an on-premise appliance called the DirectAxs Interceptor (patent pending). This device manages and monitors all communication between the customer’s applications and the Identity and Risk Platform on EC2. All communication is encrypted using client specific keys and further transmitted over SSL for the highest level of security.

The Administration and Management Portal is a multi-tenant deployment on EC2, running on the JBoss stack with a MySQL backend. This portal is used to manage the Identity environment for all customers. Customers can get logins to see to see detailed information such as:

1. Health statistics for all Identity Services
2. Drill down dashboards and reports for every service – such as Authentication Attempt reports, Provisioning Reports, HR Import statistics etc.

This portal also provides a customer the ability to define intelligent rules to better manage their Identity environments. These rules can vary from basic things like alerts for service degradation to more advance analytical events such as detection of patterns in the authentication requests or provisioning events. It enables the Information Security and Identity Management teams to have a one stop shop to manage the complexity of typical Identity Management environments.

With over 100 years of combined Identity Management implementation experience, the DirectAxs team and its unique approach should surely be considered as you evaluate your 3-year roadmap for your Identity Management technology needs.