Action Identity Blog

Passwords and security risks are a major concern for a lot of growing businesses today, especially those who have or hold access to sensitive information such as police stations, court houses, hospitals and clinics. Many of these organizations use some sort of directory system like eDirectory or Active Directory to maintain their users’ authentication and authorization into the internal network and various databases. Each organization also maintains the password policies for their users (i.e. Expires every 45 days, Must be 7 characters, Must have one number, etc…). With a growing number of applications follows an increased number of passwords, which poses difficulties in managing.  

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Currently, if you want to run an organized business, you need a directory for your employees and perhaps your clients as well. If you’re an entrepreneur and starting a small business, you may not have the financial means for purchasing one of the big named directory services such as Active Directory or NetIQ’s eDirectory. OpenDJ is a great solution for getting your business off the ground, being that it is the most complete open source directory product. OpenDJ also provides plug-and-play installation, allowing your IT staff to set up the directory and move on to configuring your budding infrastructure. OpenDJ also runs on Java, providing multi-OS deployment, including virtualized environments.

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Researching ForgeRock OpenIDM 2.0, and the website’s claim to being flexible and easy to use, has sparked my interest into what the product has to offer. ForgeRock is growing in popularity in the development community because of its open availability and the user community forums. Developers are working together to help improve the software and make a strong code base. OpenIDM 2.0 is designed to help provide businesses with a solution for business process handling and compliance and the product excels at this by using JSON for reconciliation, synchronization, and mapping, making the process of bulk importing users into a system more developer/administrator friendly. 

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User provisioning to company software such as payroll, commonly knows as identity management, has typically been a daunting task for database administrators or IT professionals. However, lately we have seen a new trend in automating the processes through means of a driver. Using drivers, the database administrator can create the user in the directory, or another program connected to the directory, and the user will be provisioned to all the programs he has access to and that are connected to the directory.  This alleviates much of the mundane task of entering the same data in multiple positions and allows the database administrator to put it in one centralized location. 

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The primary push for acquiring strong, two-factor authentication is to satisfy the CJIS Mandate.  Many state and local police departments require access to the NCIC (National Crime Information Center).  In order to retain access to this information, all law enforcement agencies must comply with the CJIS Mandate’s demand for strong, two-factor authentication.  The cut-off for this date is at the end 2012, meaning that all law enforcement departments who have not satisfied the requirements of the CJIS Mandate, but wish to retain access to the NCIC, shall be fined.

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