Tripod Technology Group, Inc. announces Federation Provisioning System (FPS) 2.0 for Managing Identities between Enterprises
June 14, 2006
MOORESTOWN, NJ - Jun. 14, 2006 - Tripod Technology Group, Inc. (TTG) today announced Federation Provisioning System (FPS) 2.0, a lightweight, non-invasive federated provisioning solution. FPS is the only provisioning solution in the industry that has been designed from the ground up with the specific purpose of meeting the provisioning needs of federated relationships.
The Business Challenge
Federated relationships can provide many business advantages. Federations allow business partners to quickly and easily collaborate by sharing applications, data, business processes, and even customers. However, there are serious barriers to entering into federations, with one of the most significant being the challenge of provisioning and de-provisioning user accounts across the federation. "The technologies and business processes for provisioning user accounts within the enterprise are fairly mature and well understood in today's market. However, this is simply not yet the case when those processes must be applied between enterprises." says Richard Sand, CEO of TTG. "While federated single sign-on technologies such as SAML and ID-FF are good at on-demand exchange of user attributes and session information, these technologies do not address managing your partners' users with the same level of control as your own users. And especially in today's business world, with the Sarbanes Oxley Act and other standards for IT controls and compliance, managing these external users maturely is a must."
Federated provisioning is the ideal answer to this challenge. Federation is the method by which identity management is extended beyond the boundaries of your organization to include multiple enterprises, such as partners, customers, public agencies, or vendors. Federated provisioning is the way that these enterprises exchange identity data - information about users, their profiles, roles, and access rights.
The FPS Solution
FPS employs a pure standards-based approach to inter-enterprise provisioning; this streamlines and simplifies the entire process, and delivers a robust, secure, yet flexible answer to the provisioning challenge.
FPS expresses all provisioning commands in the form of SPML (Service Provisioning Markup Language), an industry standard set forth by OASIS for describing provisioning tasks with XML-based messages. FPS enables enterprises to generate SPML messages and securely deliver them to partners and customers, as well as to interpret incoming SPML messages and provision its user data stores accordingly. By adhering to this industry-standard provisioning language, FPS provides maximum interoperability with other SPML compliant systems, preventing vendor lock-in.
FPS Features:
- Two distinct products, which can be used either together or stand-alone: the FPS Server, which provides a provisioning gateway to your enterprise, and the FPS Client, which provides quick and easy participation in federations for you and your partners
- Non-invasive, rapid, and low-cost implementation. One of the highest barriers to the successful entry into a federated provisioning solution is the invasive and costly implementation burden for subsidiaries and business partners. FPS bypasses this trap by providing the lightweight, low-cost FPS Client component to help you and your partners provision your federation
- Has an extensible security system that enables your enterprise to easily set up authentication and authorization for the partners in your federation
- Works out-of-the-box with your existing perimeter security solutions, such as those provided by enterprise single-sign-on products and web service security products
- Easily extensible with a comprehensive set of API's, which allow it to be easily integrated into a variety of environments
Product Availability
FPS 2.0 will be available for free download from www.ttg.cc in July 2006. Both server-based and transaction-based licenses are available. An Early Release version is available upon request today from TTG. For more information, please contact TTG.
About Tripod Technology Group, Inc.
Tripod Technology Group, Inc. is a worldwide provider of IT security services and products based in Moorestown, New Jersey with offices in Norway and Denmark. Tripod Technology Group specializes in the technologies used between organizations to enable secure, open and robust business cooperation. Please contact TTG with any questions concerning our line of services and software offerings.