Book Image

Cloud Identity Patterns and Strategies

By : Giuseppe Di Federico, Fabrizio Barcaroli
5 (1)
Book Image

Cloud Identity Patterns and Strategies

5 (1)
By: Giuseppe Di Federico, Fabrizio Barcaroli

Overview of this book

Identity is paramount for every architecture design, making it crucial for enterprise and solutions architects to understand the benefits and pitfalls of implementing identity patterns. However, information on cloud identity patterns is generally scattered across different sources and rarely approached from an architect’s perspective, and this is what Cloud Identity Patterns and Strategies aims to solve, empowering solutions architects to take an active part in implementing identity solutions. Throughout this book, you’ll cover various theoretical topics along with practical examples that follow the implementation of a standard de facto identity provider (IdP) in an enterprise, such as Azure Active Directory. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll explore the different factors that contribute to an enterprise's current status quo around identities and harness modern authentication approaches to meet specific requirements of an enterprise. You’ll also be able to make sense of how modern application designs are impacted by the company’s choices and move on to recognize how a healthy organization tackles identity and critical tasks that the development teams pivot on. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to breeze through creating portable, robust, and reliable applications that can interact with each other.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Part 1: Impact of Digital Transformation
4
Part 2: OAuth Implementation and Patterns
8
Part 3: Real-World Scenarios

A hybrid identity

As already touched on in the previous chapter, before the advent of the public internet and cloud technologies that gradually decentralized the services accessed by an organization outside of the organization’s perimeter, it was sufficient to provide users with an authentication model that granted access to internal assets. Information technology efforts were mainly focused on keeping the perimeter secure and preventing malicious users from breaching security defenses and, consequently, accessing sensitive assets within the organization’s internal network.

Let’s imagine the typical workday of an employee, Alice, in the early 2000s. Alice is a part of the engineering team of a big manufacturing company and she needs to use several services to fulfill her role and responsibilities. Alice turns on her Personal Computer (PC) first thing in the morning and logs into the operating system. She then starts her mail client to access her emails. Next...