Over the past few months, the Amplify Platform and Technology Alliance teams have been working together to develop and publish a fully supported and “Okta-Verified” integration between Okta and the Amplify platform to get listed on the Okta Integration Network.
Amplify is Okta IDP Verified
It all started with a minimum viable product concept to get the IDP concept built into the Amplify Platform. This would allow our enterprise customers to bring their way of managing their authentication and security into Amplify Platform.
What is an IDP?
An IDP or Identity Provider is a service that stores and manages digital identities. Companies use these services to allow their employees or users to connect with the resources they need. It provides a way to manage access, adding or removing privileges, while security remains tight.
Many large and SMB companies use a third-party IDP, like Okta, OneLogin, Auth0, and Ping Identity to manage their employees’ identities across services they use in their day-to-day use.
Such services offer Identity Management, the central nervous system for any organization. It starts with a directory service and goes all the way to Single Sign-On (SSO) across the services they use as employees of a company.
Third-party IDPs also offer security features like Multi-factor Authentication (MFA), Password maintenance (expiration rules, password length, complexity, etc.), plus audit trail.
Access Management
Giving our enterprise customers access to IDP is essential because it provides greater acceptance for Amplify by securing:
- Identical security policy for the enterprises followed by the enterprise
- Similar MFA policy
- Similar password complexity policy
- Similar password expiration policy
In general, a better security posture for the enterprises is that they do not use Amplify’s security, yet they use their familiar user authentication and security policy.
Companies that cannot manage their directory service for lack of proper IT staff depend on a third-party IDP provider to do this work for them.
IDPs communicate with Software vendors, SaaS/PaaS providers, and other web service providers using protocols like SAML, OIDC, and OAuth.
- SAML– Security Assertion Markup Language.
- OIDC — OpenID Connect
- OAuth — an open standard for access delegation.
These three standards have very different uses on the internet.
How does Amplify fit in?
When companies use Amplify, it becomes one such Cloud — SaaS/PaaS service, that their developers have access to.
If they happen to use a third-party IDP, then it becomes a requirement on the part of Axway to cater to a company’s IDP use. Hence, the need to support third-party IDPs in Amplify. In Amplify, we support:
- SAML 2.0
- OpenID Connect 1.0 (which is built on top of OAuth 2.0)
Most enterprises require SP initiated and Amplify currently supports this setup and configuration.
Why Okta?
There are many Access management providers, Okta, One Login, Auth0, Ping Identity, etc. We chose Okta as a reference vendor to start with and then go down the road with other vendors.
For four years in a row, Okta has been a leader in Access Management. Many companies, including some of our marquee Axway customers, depend on Okta for their Identity management needs.
Okta provides a single, unified, access management platform to secure all users, including workforce and partners.
Okta + Axway
Axway has had a long-standing integration with Okta: The Amplify B2B Integration and Amplify API Management Platform products have supported external IDP integration with Okta for quite some time. More recently Amplify Content Services (formerly Syncplicity) had an External IDP integration with Okta.
The Axway Technology Alliance Partner team wanted to use this new IDP integration feature enablement in the Amplify platform to promote Axway Amplify through Okta and unify all our IDP initiatives with Okta under one umbrella for Axway.
Documentation
IDP configuration is fully documented and available here:
- As well as getting Axway’s valid presence on the Okta Integration Network – API Management Solutions among our API Management competitors.
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