Most enterprise solutions adopt products and services from multiple cloud providers to accomplish various business requirements. This makes it insufficient to maintain user identities only in a corporate LDAP. Identity provisioning plays a key role in propagating user identities across different SaaS providers. Doing this in a non-proprietary way is the challenge that the SCIM (system for cross-domain identity management) specification intends to address.
SPML concepts
Service Provisioning Markup Language (SPML) is an XML-based framework developed by OASIS for exchanging user, resource and service provisioning information between cooperating organizations. The Service Provisioning Markup language is the open standard for the integration and interoperation of service provisioning requests. The goal of SPML is to allow organizations to securely and quickly set up user interfaces for Web services and applications, by letting enterprise platforms such as Web portals, application servers, and service centers generate provisioning requests within and across organizations. This can lead to automation of user or system access and entitlement rights to electronic services across diverse IT infrastructures, so that customers are not locked into proprietary solutions.
SCIM concepts
The System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) specification is designed to make managing user identities in the WSO2 Identity Server easier. Identity provisioning is a key aspect of any Identity Management Solution. In simple terms, it is to create, maintain and delete user accounts and related identities in one or more systems or applications in response to business processes which are initiated either by humans directly or by automated tasks.
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As this diagram of the reference implementation illustrates, a SCIM service provider can be developed using any REST implementation and SCIM-defined resources can be exposed utilizing the API provided by the Charon-Core.On On the other hand, SCIM Consumers can also be implemented using the client API of Charon-Core.