Federation Provisioning simply means provisioning user identities between enterprises. Any business-to-business (B2B) application can be thought of as a federation. Often, these processes are manual processes and are not closely managed.
These next diagrams illustrate the challenges that most enterprises face with managing the provisioning of their B2B partnerships, and the 3rd shows how a technology like SPML can solve them. SPML is an XML language that expresses provisioning commands in an industry standard form of messages and allows them to be processed between enterprises.
Most B2B solutions are provisioned manually, as shown in the diagram below. Individual employees of companies A, B, and C will browse to company X's B2B web site and create accounts using company X's "Self Registration" web application. In some cases, the manager of the employees at companies A-C must perform this registration on the users' behalf.
When an account at Company A is deactivated (e.g. due to leave-of-absense, termination, etc.), their account at Company X can only be de-provisioned in 1 of 3 ways:
This creates the obvious problems of administrative overhead and the likelyhood that someone from your company may still have access to your partner's B2B services long after they are supposed to!
With Federated Provisioning, the provisioning of Service Providers (partners) is automatically linked to the existing local provisioning processes, such as those implemented in a local Human Resources system. The use of SPML has allowed the local company to control provisioning its partners in the exact same way it provisions its own systems, without any costly proprietary integration solutions with the Service Provider.
