Transforming Enterprise Identity Management Through Utilization of Delayed Processing: Council Discussion
In today's digitally-driven world, businesses are dealing with an exponentially increasing demand for managing identities. With the surge in reliance on software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and cloud ecosystems, traditional methods of identity management might not suffice. This growing need for handling identities necessitates a new approach to address such challenges, helping organizations tackle large-scale identity provisioning.
Enter the System for Cross-Domain Identity Management (SCIM) 2.0, a standard protocol developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in 2015. SCIM simplifies identity provisioning through the use of standard APIs, providing a solution to the automatic exchange of identity information across various domains and IT systems. Utilizing standard RESTful APIs and data schemas, SCIM allows seamless communication between identity providers and service providers, maintaining consistent identity data across multiple platforms.
However, SCIM's inherent synchronous nature can create bottlenecks during bulk operations and large-scale migrations in many large organizations that rely on legacy systems. Handling large workloads with synchronous processing, low latency requirements, and high performance can be challenging in such setups.
A Fresh Perspective
To tackle these limitations, an asynchronous extension to SCIM was introduced, incorporating non-blocking, event-driven request processing capabilities. This paradigm enables enterprises to efficiently manage large-scale identity operations, offering key aspects such as:
- Asynchronous Request Processing: By decoupling request submission from its processing, operations can be handled asynchronously, allowing other non-dependent requests to proceed uninterrupted.
- Status Tracking: Each request is assigned a unique ID for real-time monitoring, enabling users to keep tabs on the progress of their requests.
- Bulk Operations: Large requests can be broken down into smaller, manageable chunks for parallel processing, making provisioning faster and more manageable at scale.
- Notifications: Both identity providers and users can be notified upon completion of the operations, ensuring smooth and predictable operations.
By embracing this asynchronous model, organizations can overcome the challenges posed by the synchronous nature of SCIM processing. This approach allows for seamless handling of large volumes of identity operations without relying too heavily on manual intervention.
Perfect Match: Event-Driven Architectures
To implement such a system, event-driven architectures (EDAs) are a natural complement to the asynchronous processing of identities. Operating by reacting to events in real-time, EDAs are an excellent fit for platforms with a combination of legacy and modern systems. EDAs can enhance identity management through:
- Automated Workflows: SCIM can automate workflows for handling identity changes through service provider and identity provider integration. EDAs enrich this capability by enabling various systems to process such events without requiring batch jobs or manual intervention.
- Scalability and Flexibility: EDAs can scale independently, processing operations at their own pace without being constrained by synchronous dependencies or bottlenecks. This ability is particularly beneficial during periods of high traffic or during large migrations.
- Resilience: Events can be persisted in message queues, and retry mechanisms can be implemented for consistent delivery, allowing the service provider to manage intermittent issues.
- Support for Notifications: Notifications can be sent to callers upon completion of operations across all required systems, ensuring a streamlined user experience.
This approach results in effective synchronization of identity data across affected systems, reducing errors and improving overall system reliability.
Simplified Migrations
Mergers, acquisitions, or migrations from one system to another require countless identities to be moved. These processes need careful planning to minimize disruptions. The goal of these migrations is to maintain data consistency without causing loss or corruption of the data. Generally, migrations do not need synchronous processing and can be managed asynchronously, making the process more efficient and scalable while avoiding the synchronous bottlenecks often encountered.
Embracing the Change
Organizations can adopt this asynchronous SCIM approach by following these practical steps:
- Assess Current Processes: Critically examine the areas of identity operations, their performance, and bottlenecks, and find areas for bulk processing, large migrations, and implementing the new process.
- Event-Driven Principles: If the organization is not using these principles, it's time to explore their benefits and incorporate them into the identity management strategy.
- Integration: Integrate the asynchronous processing with existing SCIM-compatible systems.
- Optimization: Continuously evaluate and refine workflows to maximize performance.
My Experience
Daily, our system processes tens of millions of operations efficiently without requiring manual effort. This entire workflow operates through an event-driven system, designed to handle large-scale workloads. By integrating the asynchronous SCIM approach into clients' existing environments, we've seen substantial reductions in manual efforts needed for identity provisioning, demonstrating the scalability and efficiency of this paradigm in real-world scenarios.
Parting Thoughts
Asynchronous processing is crucial for both enterprises with legacy systems and cloud-native solutions, enabling them to scale their identity operations effectively. When this approach is combined with event-driven architectures, it allows for the automation, streamlining, and securing of identity operations. This paradigm offers tools to simplify identity management without needing constant troubleshooting. Enterprises aiming to remain agile and tackle identity management challenges should consider this approach.
Ravi Laudya, in his role, has successfully implemented an asynchronous SCIM approach in their system, processing tens of millions of operations efficiently without requiring manual effort. This approach has resulted in substantial reductions in manual efforts needed for identity provisioning, showcasing the scalability and efficiency of this paradigm in real-world scenarios.
To further optimize identity operations, enterprises can adopt this asynchronous SCIM approach by adopting event-driven principles, integrating the new process with existing SCIM-compatible systems, and continuously evaluating and refining workflows.
With the introduction of asynchronous processing, organizations can overcome the synchronous bottlenecks often encountered during large-scale migrations, mergers, or acquisitions, maintaining data consistency without causing loss or corruption.
