General FAQ

Sun Java System Federation Manager is a solution that allows organizations to more easily enable federation with partners. Federation Manager is a standards- based solution that supports all the major federation standards such as SAML, Liberty, and WS-Federation. Users can quickly and cost-effectively sign on across partner sites without compromising security or privacy. Federation Manager ensures seamless, secure user interactions with applications and services deployed across partner sites without the need for logging in separately each time or for each application.

Federation Manager allows users to sign on once and gain access to an organization's applications and services as well as to applications and services provided through that organization's partner's sites. It helps link separate accounts maintained at an organization as well as those on its partner sites. When a user signs out, Federation Manager globally signs out that user from the organization's site and each partner site.

It also enables an organization to enrich the user experience by personalizing partner sites based on the user's information and privileges. Federation Manager achieves all this through a standards-based framework, which is easy to set up and then repeat for multiple partners.

Some of the benefits that Federation Manager delivers are:

• Centralizes the storing of user information and eliminates the cost of managing and maintaining user identity and credential information across partner sites.
• Reduces infrastructure costs by creating a repeatable process to bring partnerships online.
• Simplifies the online user experience.
• Creates a single set of credentials for the user to remember and manage.
• Enables partners to avoid being in the expensive business of credential management (e.g. help desk support).
• Increases revenue opportunities by helping deliver new services faster to customers.
• Reduces deployment costs by leveraging existing security infrastructure.

Organizations should consider using Federation Manager to address three main scenarios:

• Business Process Outsourcing and extranet web single sign-on
• Internal Web single sign-on
• Federated Web services

Each of the above scenarios is answered by the following questions.

Access to an outsourced application is the most prevalent use case today. Organizations are outsourcing activities that are not core to their business. For example, an organization may choose to outsource HR administration applications to an external entity that has a core competence in HR management. In this case, Federation Manager would be deployed at the external HR service provider. Once users log in to their own organization's security infrastructure, they can seamlessly access the outsourced HR applications without having to provide their login credentials again. This enhances the user experience and reduces costs by ensuring the service provider does not have the associated user account management overhead.

Yes, it definitely can. Many large businesses are organized as separate cost centers or business units. These business units may maintain their own security infrastructure, and it is not uncommon that they have different IT solutions. This is especially true for organizations that have done mergers or acquisitions. Federation Manager can enable single sign-on across these heterogeneous environments, providing users from one business unit access to applications owned and provided by another.

Yes, Federation Manager can also help with Web services by carrying the user's identity information from the Web-based login into the Web services. This provides for an end-to-end audit trail and also helps ensure that the data returned by the Web service calls is in accordance with the privileges of the user.

Sun has ensured that Federation Manager is a standards-based framework that can be run on a variety of web servers and application servers. Additionally, Federation Manager has been successfully deployed in environments with multiple existing identity-enabling technologies, including access management solutions from vendors other than Sun.

Access Manager and Federation Manager closely complement each other to deliver a comprehensive identity federation solution. Federation Manager provides the functionality to be deployed at the service provider, while Access Manager is a Web access management solution that has complete federation capabilities for the identity provider. Together, they make it easier to:

• Leverage existing security capabilities at an organization (ie the identity provider).
• Provide federation capabilities to smaller partners with limited or no identity and security infrastructure.
• Link networks of partners into trusted domains so they can share consistent, pervasive, and reusable identities securely and privately.