Identity Provisioning Concepts

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. The challenge that the SCIM (system for cross-domain identity management) specification intends to address is, how to propagate these user identities in an unconventional manner.

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.

Today the enterprise solutions adopt products and services from multiple cloud providers in order to accomplish various business requirements. Hence it is no longer sufficient to maintain user identities only in corporate LDAP.

In most cases, SaaS providers also need dedicated user accounts created for the cloud service users, which raises the need of proper identity provisioning mechanisms to be in place. Currently, different cloud vendors expose non-standard provisioning APIs which makes it a nightmare for the enterprises to develop and maintain proprietary connectors to integrate with multiple SaaS providers.

For example, Google exposes Google Provisioning API for provisioning user accounts in Google Apps Domain.

When enterprise IT systems consist of distributed, heterogeneous components from multiple vendors and from both in house and from cloud, it is key to have an open standard that all agree upon, in order to achieve interoperability and simplicity while getting rid of multiple connectors to perform the same thing.

System for Cross-domain Identity Management is an emerging open standard which defines a comprehensive REST API along with a platform neutral schema and a SAML binding to facilitate the user management operations across SaaS applications; placing specific emphasis on simplicity and interoperability as well.