What is Security Assertion Markup Language

Enterprises are increasingly interested in new and cost effective technologies to leverage existing investments in IT and extend capabilities to reduce costs and improve security and productivity. User account and password management has long been a major expense for organizations. As a means to improve the integration of applications hosted both internal and external to the enterprise, enterprises are turning to automated account provisioning systems for providing secure and efficient accesses to wide range of systems. Provisioning and Identity Management are key technologies for enhancing operational efficiencies and gaining improvements in productivity and security. With tremendous growth in the number of information systems and user accounts in any enterprise, standards are key and necessary for solutions to interoperate and integrate with existing solutions. SPML is such a standard that has recently gained immense adoption from organizations. This shift can have major impact on enterprise’s information architecture. In this chapter, we outline the concepts of identity provisioning, service provisioning and how SPML can be leveraged to provide enterprise identity provisioning to both internal and external applications. The paper suggests come common security and business benefits that SPML can introduce. The paper also presents detailed discourse on architecture of SPML and improvises an implementation scenario to effect the functioning of different features and protocols of the standard.