Three areas of focus for IDaas?
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In the Federated Identity with a Third-party Service video in Domain 5 of the CISSP series, Adam describes 3 areas of focus for IDaas. This confuses me because when I think of IDaas, I think "cloud-based" yet one of the areas of focus listed is "on-premise". Is this really correct or is there some nuance I am missing?
Thanks!
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Hi, Doug! Thanks for submitting your question.
Yes, indeed IDaaS usually includes an on-premise solution. Think of it this way: Having an on-premise IAM solution (even if it is paired with an IDaaS partner) is the best solution if you are concerned with losing your Internet connection. Nothing is worse than your Internet access going down (for whatever reason) and your users being unable to authenticate because the IDaaS solution cannot be accessed. Now, a true IDaaS solution is a cloud-based solution. But having an on-premise service just provides that redundancy and fault tolerance that we security professionals love.
An on-premises solution alone is not IDaaS. To have an on-premises solution that is part of IDaaS, an organization MUST have an IDaaS cloud provider and integrate their on-premises solution with the cloud provider's deployment.
I hope this helps to clarify.
Happy studying!
~Robin -
Hi Robin,
Thanks for the explanation. I think I am getting a better idea of what is attempting to be communicated. Basically an IDaaS at its most basic is cloud-based. However it is advantageous to have an on-premise component for managing users and use directory synchronization to keep things in sync with the cloud directory. In addition, it is also possible to have the whole system be federated which in addition to the directory synchronization allows the on-premise component to handle login requests instead of those requests always having to go out to the cloud-based system or maybe it is just as you wrote this is a redundancy in case the cloud-based provider is temporarily not available.
Am I understanding you correctly?
Thanks!
Doug
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Yes - it sure seems like you have it Doug! When a technology is defined like IDaaS - there are general statements made about how it is implemented. Unfortunately, these statements are so general that they do not always reflect how a specific organization is implementing the technology.
Time for an extreme example - you could have a company go completely cloud for their IT and now there would be NO on-prem identity services.
