Focus Magazine - Summer 2015 - (Page 36)

TECHNOLOGY Identity Hubs: Secure, Productive Collaboration I By Tom Johnson C loud, mobile, and social technologies are changing the business model in the life science industry. Organizations are embracing collaboration with external partners, fueled by the growing ease with which individuals can connect and communicate across enterprise boundaries - from anywhere, at any time, using any device. External collaboration oﬀers the potential to reduce costs and accelerate time-to-market for drug development and delivery by leveraging the strengths and expertise of each participant. e benefits of working with external partners are compelling. However, organizations must take care in how they establish and operate the collaborative environment. Taking the wrong approach can actually increase costs, tie up valuable resources, extend schedules, and put sensitive information and intellectual property at risk for compromise and regulatory compliance violations. Home Grown e option organizations typically first explore is to set up and run the collaborative environment themselves, in large part because they want to maintain control of access to their applications and data by partners. When all participants engage in this manner, they create a full mesh of party-to-party agreements and connections that produce redundant infrastructure. ey also impose a massive burden on their IT departments to support databases or directories that identify external partner user privileges and permissions, yet quickly become outdated. And they require individuals to possess numerous credentials to log in to a variety of partner applications. e ultimate results of this choice are unnecessary capital and operating expenditures, delays in getting partners provisioned into the collaborative environment, multiple points of vulnerability, and a poor user experience. As the number of partners rises, so does the degree of pain. Cloud Collaboration Another approach to external partner collaboration, the cloud-based identity hub, is gaining traction in the life science industry. Rather than establishing point-to-point connections with every partner, organizations simply connect once to the identity hub, through which they have communications channels with all partners. e identity hub relies on a hybrid cloud implementation, which combines the open ease of access of the public cloud with the security of the private cloud. In essence, the identity hub becomes the centerpiece of a collaborative community. To make life even easier for all community members, the identity hub can be deployed by a trusted third-party through an as-a-service delivery model. e identity hub provider handles the on-boarding of all organizations, their applications, and their users to the community. rough a process called delegated administration, organizations continue to determine which external users can access their applications, data, and other assets. e identity hub provider collects this information continuously and is responsible for maintaining a master repository of privileges and permissions, which it uses to enforce the rules assigned by asset owners when individuals request access. Standards and Such e identity hub's architecture makes it possible for individuals to reach any community application with a single credential, which is used by the identity hub provider to authenticate the individual's identity and allow access to community assets via web-based single sign-on. at credential may have been issued by a participating 36 FOCUS | SUMMER 2015 | www.L-TEN.org http://www.L-TEN.org

Focus Magazine - Summer 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Focus Magazine - Summer 2015