The XACML and Fine-Grained Authorization Leader
Product Overview
Authorization management tools are emerging, which provide authorization policy administration, decision-making and enforcement at runtime, external to applications.
– Gartner, Inc. “Authorization Management: Where Access and Application Meet”
by Earl Perkins
Keystone is a standards-based "universal adapter" that unifies the Identity and Access Management (IAM) functions of individual applications behind a single, centralized management platform. Harnessing the power of XACML 3.0, Keystone enables organizations to better address their security, compliance and governance requirements across different, sometimes disparate, applications from a single and easy-to-manage point. The result is a better, more controlled and cost-effective way to protect access to corporate applications and data through strong centralized authentication and fine-grained authorization.
Historically, every application came with its own user identity store and its own authorization logic. Authentication and authorization policies had to be managed for each individual application by writing the code into the application. This led to a number of problems, such as:
- Long and costly development and maintenance cycles from custom coding of applications
- Poor control over application security
- Inability to implement policy changes consistently and immediately
- Inability to perform enterprise-wide auditing and entitlement management
- No support for scalability
Keystone overcomes these challenges by externalizing the authentication and authorization logic away from the application code. When an application, service, mobile app, or web app is Keystone-enabled, it becomes decoupled from the specific protocol or language that it uses to communicate with its user directory or any other authentication source. Applications don't need to be aware of the underlying authentication source. Applications simply call Keystone and Keystone bridges that gap.
In a similar way, Keystone decouples the authorization logic from the hard-coded role names in the application logic. Fine-grained access control is centrally managed, and changes to the authorization policies are instantly implemented across all applications.
Keystone is the highest-performing XACML solution available. It empowers application developers and security professionals to quickly and effectively secure applications in today's complex and rapidly-evolving business requirements.
Enterprises using Keystone have reported saving about 30% on average on IT costs by moving away from writing and maintaining individual authentication and authorization codes for each and every application.
