Okta Identity Management for Portals Built on Salesforce.com
Okta: Enterprise Identity, Delivered
Okta is an enterprise grade identity management service, built from the ground up in the cloud and delivered with an unwavering focus on customer success. The Okta service provides directory services, single sign-on, strong authentication, provisioning, workflow, and built in reporting. Enterprises everywhere are using Okta to manage access across any application, person or device to increase security, make people more productive, and maintain compliance.
Portals on Salesforce.com: Overview and Challenges
The Salesforce.com’s suite of platforms and applications offer enterprises the ability to roll out rich customer-facing applications quickly, with no hardware or operations infrastructure required. The suite provides both packaged solutions, like the Salesforce CRM Customer Portal, and a platform for custom application development. Enterprises can mix and match components from the suite to quickly build solutions with the right mix of functionality. Because they are built in the cloud, customer solutions are stable, quick to deploy and scale transparently. If all of the components of the solution are built on Salesforce.com’s platform, they are integrated out of the box and provide a seamless experience as users navigate from one area of the portal to the next. However, challenges can arise when enterprises need to integrate systems not built on Salesforce.com, or not built within the same Salesforce.com organisation.
For example, a printer company might provide a mix of marketing, sales, and support functionality online within a single portal. Customers can open support tickets,look up answers to commonly asked questions, and download manuals and software updates. Additionally, partners can use the portal to access partner marketing materials and register deals for special discounts. To both customers and partners, this portal should look like the printer company’s own web application. But behind the scenes, administrators selected several different applications and platforms to manage these tasks. They chose Salesforce Customer Portal for case management and content management; Jive for customer communities; a shipping company’s proprietary application to handle all returns; and a set of custom built Force.com and ASP. NET apps for specific business functions.
While each of those components offer the best features and user experience for their specific function, there are several challenges associated with the disjointed approach represented in Figure 1:
• The user experience is not seamless—different logins are often needed for different sections of the portal.
• Users must register separately for each section, complicating the user experience.
• Separate user stores proliferate and become difficult for the IT team to manage.
Solving this problem with custom software development is difficult, time-consuming, and potentially very expensive. Okta’s identity management service solves these problems by allowing organisations to present a single, well-integrated web application to all customers and partners, who can navigate it with a single set of credentials (see Figure 2). Centralised registration can be automated, and users log in only once. Okta also allows users to be easily provisioned and de-provisioned in the target applications. Upon login, customers and partners can be routed to a single landing page, from which they can navigate to any allowed application with no additional hurdles.
With Okta, organisations can quickly and easily automate all portal user management functionality and provide customers and partners with a seamless experience—all with a 100-percent on-demand, secure, highly available service.
Automating Portal Identity Management with Okta
Okta provides a broad set of functionality to address the user management, single sign-on, and reporting needs ideal for enterprises using Salesforce.com portal applications in a heterogeneous environment.
A Flexible Cloud Identity Store
Okta’s service contains a native cloud user store, which allows customer, partner, and employee identities to be centralised in a single location. The native cloud user store can operate independently from, or in combination with, external directory services. User profiles and their associated properties can originate in Okta and be managed from Okta, or they can be mastered from a variety of external sources.
For example, an organisation may have a set of internal employees that needs access to its portal and whose identities are managed in Active Directory. Okta could leverage AD to authenticate internal employees who access the portal applications, but customer and partner user accounts could be managed natively in Okta, eliminating the need for yet another directory. Okta can also manage customer and partner accounts in an existing corporate directory.
Automated User Registration and Application User Management
With Okta, portal users only need to register once; accounts are then automatically created in each behind-the-scenes web application with Okta’s user management capabilities.
When administrators add users to the system, Okta supports initial user registration with:
• The Okta administrative interface.
• Bulk import from a CSV file or from an external directory service.
• Programmatic use of Okta’s RESTful user management APIs.
Okta’s RESTful APIs can be used in conjunction with a custom user registration form built on Force.com to support completely selfservice user provisioning, or they can support required approval workflows.
As a part of the user creation process, Okta can also transform the username format to ensure there are no violations of various cloud applications’ username format requirements. This is critical in Salesforce.com environments, because Salesforce.com requires that usernames be unique across all of its customers’ applications. That means that a user who has registered with an email address in one Salesforce.com portal cannot use the same email in any other. Okta solves this problem by applying a transformation for that user and would instead provision as [email protected] to ensure there are no user namespace conflicts with Salesforce.com.
Okta goes even further: application-specific user properties such permission groups, role, or profile can also be set based on rules associated with the Okta user profile. Attributes of that profile are then pushed into the behind-the-scenes applications as part of the provisioning process.
Single Sign-On to Any Cloud or Web Application
Okta creates a seamless user experience by providing single signon to all of the web applications that make up an organisation’s portal. Users log in once, and then are passed on to each portion of the portal without having to re-enter credentials.
To provide SSO to all applications, Okta must first establish an authenticated session with the user’s browser. Once this session has been established, Okta can authenticate the user to any connected application subject to the access control rules set within Okta. There are three primary ways that the initial Okta session can be created:
• Using the Okta “My Applications” landing page.
• Using Service Provider Initiated SAML (SP SAML) with an existing portal.
• By POSTing credentials to the Okta service, then redirecting back to a custom portal page in Salesforce.com or elsewhere.
Okta’s “My Applications” landing page provides a simple launch point to all assigned applications. This option is commonly used when no central portal exists and the requirements for customisation are minimal.
In the SP initiated SAML method, users navigate to a central portal, for example, http://support.acme.com. If they are not already logged in, they are redirected to an Okta login page along with a SAML request, then sent back to the portal with a SAML response after entering their correct username and password. The SAML response transparently logs the user into the portal. At this point, the user has both a portal session and an Okta session that can be used to transparently authenticate to any assigned application (see Figure 3).
In the last option, POSTing credentials to Okta, then redirecting back to a custom portal page, users are first presented with an unauthenticated landing page built on the platform of your choice. Typically, the page includes a login widget showing username and password fields. When the user fills these in and clicks “log in”, the form is POSTed to Okta where the credentials are validated against Okta’s user store. An Okta session is then created and the user is then sent back into the base portal using SAML or any other supported mechanism.
Once the Okta session has been established, users can transparently authenticate to any assigned application using a catalogue-based or custom SSO integration. Those SSO integrations can either be federated (supporting a standard such as SAML or another proprietary federated authentication protocol) or leverage Okta’s Secure Web Authentication (SWA) to perform a secure, form-driven post to the application login page.
Applications in the Okta Application Network (generally, any commercial application) come pre-integrated for SSO using SAML or SWA. These integrations are delivered as part of the service and are continually maintained and updated by Okta.
For custom applications that are not in the Okta Application Network, Okta provides integration toolkits to easily enable SAML, as shown in Figure 5. The SAML integration toolkits are available for .NET apps running on IIS, and they support forms authentication and a variety of other languages including Java and PHP. Alternatively, organisations can leverage Okta’s SWA to achieve SSO to these applications.
With SWA, no programmatic interface or protocols are required. Instead, users are authenticated transparently to the application by its automating the login process. SWA only requires that the user account in the target application be provisioned with a known password that can then be stored securely in the Okta service.
Integration and Federated Authentication with Third Party Portals
A common portal configuration is as an embedded portal, where your portal is embedded within another application operated by a third party. For example, let’s say you maintain a product configuration portal for your partners. One of your distributors could embed your product configuration portal within their own order processing application, and could then provide a more complete solution. With Okta, that solution is made seamless for the distributor’s employees because they only need to log in once.
A frequent additional requirement for these embedded portals is to allow users who access an embedded portal to do so seamlessly from their own company network, without requiring additional login credentials. Continuing with this example, the employees of the distributor would authenticate once by logging on to their corporate network in the morning, and subsequently accessing the product configuration tool later in the day without any additional logins. This seamless access would also require accounts to be automatically provisioned for employees of the distributor.
Okta enables all of this by supporting inbound SAML assertions from another identity provider; these are then used to both provision new accounts and to grant access to the relevant applications that power the portal. In fact, Okta can be configured to support multiple inbound SAML sources and map the corresponding identities to a single Salesforce.com SAML endpoint. This makes it possible to embed one instance of a Salesforce.com portal in several partner sites at once.
In the example above, employees of the distributor authenticate to their corporate networks as normal, and when they first attempt to access the portal, they are sent to Okta via SAML assertions from their Identity Provider (IDP) for authentication. If no account exists, a new user account can be automatically provisioned. User permissions are then processed and accounts provisioned in all necessary applications that power the portal (in this example the product configuration tool). The result is a seamless user experience for the distributor’s employees when they navigate between their corporate apps and the portal.
A Platform That Integrates with Existing Identity Management Solutions
Okta can easily integrate with custom-built applications, business processes, and even existing identity management solutions.
Web applications can be SSO-enabled using simple code templates provided by Okta in a variety of languages including Java, ASP. NET, and PHP. In addition, Okta can integrate with an existing onpremises identity management solution.
For example, a single integration between Okta and an existing identity management solution can allow Okta to provide both SSO and user management to all applications already integrated with that identity management solution. Additional cloud and on-premises applications can then be integrated directly with Okta, and the whole collection managed within a single consistent framework. This solution leverages existing infrastructure investments for fast implementation while providing a consistent user experience across older and newer applications, whether onpremises or in the cloud.
Example: Acme Corp
Acme Corp has developed a set of applications for partners and customers. These apps include:
• A download site built using custom PHP.
• A partner site with deal registration built on Force.com.
• A support site built on Jive and Salesforce CRM Customer Portal.
Acme needs to allow access to all of these using a single username and password. Users should register once and be granted access to the appropriate sites based on their profile. User profiles include customers with support contracts, customers without valid support contracts, and resell partners.
Customers with support get access to the download and support sites; unsupported customers get access to the download site only; and partners get access to all three sites. Supported and unsupported customers self-register by filling out a form hosted on an unauthenticated section of the support site. Partners are registered by partner managers via a form hosted on the partner portal.
Architecting the Solution with Okta— Registering and Managing Users
To manage user registration and create user accounts in each of these applications, Okta provides rich user management capabilities. A user can be created via Okta APIs called from the user registration form in the Salesforce Customer Portal. The API supports setting basic user properties, including contact info and group memberships. For example, Joe Partner is created and added to a group called “partners”. The Okta group membership determines which downstream accounts need to be created in the relevant applications. In Joe’s case, accounts that can be automated using Okta’s user provisioning capabilities need to be created in all four apps. For apps and platforms like Jive and Force. com, this is enabled through the Okta Application Network and requires no custom code or configuration by the administrator.
For the custom PHP application, Okta can call out via a simple REST-based interface to notify the application that a new user needs to be created. The application developer can then process that REST call and add the user to the app’s user directory.
Enabling Single Sign-On
To enable SSO between these applications, Okta must be connected to each. For Force. com, Jive, and Salesforce Customer Portal, administrators can achieve this by selecting the applications from the Okta Application Network following a simple two- to four-step wizard. SAML is the preferred SSO mechanism in each of these cases, but the details and heavy lifting required to establish a trust relationship and assertion bindings are hidden from the Acme. com administrator and delivered as a part of the Okta service.
For SSO to the custom PHP application, Acme.com can use simple template and sample PHP code provided by Okta that can be integrated by Acme.com developers into the login page of the application. Once this code has been embedded, Okta can provide SSO into the app transparently in the same way that it does for Force.com and other cloud apps. Alternatively, Acme.com can also leverage Okta’s SWA protocol to enable SSO.
Automated Portal SSO and User Management
Once the applications have been enabled for SSO and user management, either with integrations from the Okta Application Network or SAML libraries from Okta, and the user registration has been wired in using Okta’s REST management API, the system is ready to go.
Users can register once and their accounts will be created in all relevant apps. They can seamlessly authenticate to any application and navigate via embedded links to any other app without being prompted for additional credentials. Moreover, if user properties such as email address or group memberships are updated, those properties will be propagated automatically to all relevant applications. The solution is simple to enable, easy to manage, and provides an excellent user experience.
Summary
Okta’s identity and access management service greatly simplifies the creation of web portals for both customers and partners. Okta allows organisations to:
• Present a single, well-integrated web application to all customers and partners.
• Automate user registration and subsequent provisioning and de-provisioning for the target applications behind a portal.
• Provide customers and partners with a single landing page for login, and with navigation to allowed applications with no additional hurdles.
• Eliminate separate, unsynchronised user stores.
With Okta, organisations can quickly and easily automate all portal user management needs with a 100-percent on-demand, secure, and highly available service.
