Preface
The world around us is changing faster than ever before. Technology is leading this change in a multitude of ways:
- Every company is a software company
- Big companies are restructuring themselves to be able to deal with such a fast evolution
- Start-ups are forging themselves around technology, building organigrams optimized to put technology at the center
- Architectural paradigms are evolving to produce cloud-ready scalable designs
All in all, enterprises that aim for an ambitious and sustainable time to market to stay ahead of the competition cannot deal with technology in the same way they would have done years ago.
This book leverages these concepts to focus on the impact of core technology that is paramount for an enterprise: its identity.
Focusing on how digital transformation is reflected in identities, with a broad view, this book will cover, among others, the following aspects:
- Enterprise identities that have a direct impact on employees’ productivity
- Customer identities, consumed by the client, and the service an enterprise offers
- Application identities and the new challenges related to cloud-born applications which are distributed with independent microservices that requires mutual authentications
Besides business understanding, part of the book will be technically oriented and you will be guided in understanding why an identity strategy is important, the importance of protocols such as OAuth, and the different flows needed according to the scenario, as well as recommended identity patterns for distributed applications.
Who this book is for
The recommended audience for this book is enterprise architects and people with technical profiles.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Walkthrough of Digital Identity in the Enterprise, covers basic concepts to support you in understanding the main challenges around digital identity.
Chapter 2, The Cloud Era and Identity, explains how the cloud and the modern architectural pattern add further challenges around the topic of identity
Chapter 3, OAuth 2.0 and OIDC, describes the most widely used identity protocol in cloud applications.
Chapter 4, Authentication Flows, provides an overview of different ways to adopt OAuth according to the context.
Chapter 5, Exploring Identity Patterns, looks at some basic patterns to be used with OAuth and also maps typical identity requirements with the related impact on application design.
Chapter 6, Trends in API Authentication, covers identity design from a high-level point of view: how an API portfolio of a company may look and how identity patterns can be implemented. It describes how new trends such as service meshes map with identity strategies.
Chapter 7, Identity Providers in the Real World, provides an overview of the various choices we have for IdPs by mentioning the most common ones in enterprise and high-level specifications.
Chapter 8, Real-World Identity Provider – A Zoom-In on Azure Active Directory, provides a zoom-in on the capabilities of a specific identity provider (Azure Active Directory). This will help you to understand the typical customizations and features available and how to leverage them to facilitate an identity strategy.
Chapter 9, Exploring Real-World Scenarios, focuses on the experience we have collected in the real world. The chapter covers the 360-degree impact of identity within an organization. It will also help you to understand how enterprise structure can affect strategic choices and how important it is to have the technical team connected with the business team for a long-term winning strategy within a company.
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We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots and diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://packt.link/U2PwD.
Conventions used
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: “The client application (a public client specifically, since a confidential client must specify the client_secret parameter too) requests an access token from the /token endpoint by sending the authorization code.”
A block of code is set as follows:
GET /authorize?
response_type=code
&client_id=s6BhdRkqt3
&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fclient.example.org%2Fcb
&scope=openid%20resource_server_id When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
POST /token HTTP/1.1
Host: authzserver.example.com
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Authorization: Basic czZCaGRSa3F0MzpnWDFmQmF0M2JW Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: “Select System info from the Administration panel.”
Tips or important notes
Appear like this.
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