MacMaven Consulting offers PingFederate architecture, installation, and support services. In the first part of our SSO series, I explained what SSO is, and the special flavor of SSO called federation. In this post, I’ll give a brief introduction to PingFederate.
PingFederate, a product of Ping Identity, is one of the most popular enterprise solutions for identity federation. Its claim to fame is its speed of deployment. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call PingFederate SAML in a box. It can be deployed as a SAML identity provider (IdP) or a service provider (SP). PingFederate has a simple, web-driven interface to manage your SAML connections, certificates, and connection adapters.
A relatively new addition to PingFederate is its OAuth Authorization Server (AS). This can work in conjunction with SAML, but in most use cases the AS works as a standalone protocol engine. It essentially provides the functionality to turn your company into an SSO provider like Facebook or Google+. The AS offers two kinds of access tokens, its own internally managed proprietary token, and the JWT standard token. It can also issue OpenID Connect tokens, which is an emerging standard leveraging the JWT. Lastly, the PingFederate AS offers web services to validate the tokens it issues.
MacMaven Consulting can help solve your company’s federation challenges. Contact us and see what makes us different.