Introduction to Deployment Planning

The proliferation of cloud-based technologies, mobile devices, social networks, Big Data, enterprise applications, and business-to-business (B2B) services has spurred the exponential growth of identity information, which is often stored in varied and widely-distributed identity environments.

The challenges of securing such identity data and the environments that depend on the identity data are daunting. Organizations that expand their services in-house or globally through internal development or through acquisitions must manage identities across wide spectrum of identity infrastructures. This expansion requires a careful integration of acquisitions must manage identities across a wide spectrum of identity infrastructures. This expansion requires a careful integration of disparate access management systems, platform-dependent architectures with limited scalability, and ad-hoc security components.

ForgeRock, a leader in the IAM market, provides proven solutions to securing your identity data with its Identity Relationship Management (IRM) platform.

Identity Management is the automated provisioning, updating, and de-provisioning of identities over their lifecycles. Access Management is the authentication and authorization of identities who desire privileged access to an organization’s resources. Access management encompasses the central auditing of operations performed on the system by customers, employees, and partners. Access management also provides the means to share identity data across different access management systems, legacy implementations, and networks.

OpenAM is an all-in-one open source, centralized access management solution, securing protected resources across the network and providing authentication, authorization, Web security, and Federation Services in a single, integrated solution. OpenAM is deployed as a simple .war file and provides production-proven platform independence, flexible and extensible components, as well as a high availability and a highly scalable infrastructure. Using open standards, OpenAM is fully extensible, and can expand its capabilities through its SDKs and numerous REST endpoints.

OpenAM is part of ForgeRock’s Identity Relationship Management (IRM) platform, built upon ForgeRock’s Open Identity Stack, an open source identity and access management provider of mobile-ready, cloud, enterprise, social, and partner services. The IRM platform provides global consumer services across any platform for any connected device or any Internet-connected entity.

ForgeRock IRM platform features the following products:

OpenAM is an open source centralized access management server, securing protected resources across the network and providing authentication, authorization, Web security, and federation services in a single, integrated solution. OpenAM manages access to the protected resources by controlling who has access, when, how long, and under what conditions by centralizing disparate hardware and software services for cloud, enterprise, mobile, and business-to-business (B2B) systems.

"OpenAM Architecture" illustrates the OpenAM architecture.

OpenAM features a highly modular and flexible architecture with multiple plugin points to meet any customer deployment. It leverages industry standard protocols, such as HTTP, XML, SOAP, REST, SAML 2.0, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect 1.0, and so forth to deliver a high performance, highly scalable, and highly available access management solution over the network. OpenAM services are 100% Java-based, proven across multiple platforms and containers in many production deployments.

OpenAM core server can be deployed and integrated within existing network infrastructures. OpenAM provides the following distribution files:

ForgeRock’s OpenAM product is built on open-source code. ForgeRock maintains the OpenAM product, providing the community an open-source code repository, issue tracking, mailing lists, and web sites. ForgeRock also provides commercial releases of fully tested builds. ForgeRock offers the services you need to deploy OpenAM commercial builds into production, including training, consulting, and support.

The goal of OpenAM is to provide secure, low friction access to valued resources while presenting the user with a consistent experience. OpenAM provides excellent security, which is totally transparent to the user.

OpenAM provides the following key benefits to your organization:

OpenAM’s timeline is summarized as follows:

In February 2010, a small group of former Sun employees founded ForgeRock to continue OpenSSO support, which was renamed to OpenAM. ForgeRock continued OpenAM’s development with the following releases:

ForgeRock continues to develop, enhance, and support the industry-leading OpenAM product to meet the changing and growing demands of the market.

ForgeRock also took over responsibility for support and development of the OpenDS directory server, which was renamed as OpenDJ. ForgeRock plans to continue to maintain, enhance, and support OpenDJ.