Modernize Access To On-Premise Apps Using an ADC and Idaptive IDaaS
An on-premise Application Delivery Controller (ADC) is a critical piece of any IT infrastructure. It performs critical functions related to high availability, performance, and security of on-premise apps. ADCs started in the 90’s as purely load balancing appliances, and evolved to handle compression, caching, traffic shaping, application security and more, for on-premise as well as cloud apps. Here are some of the leading products competing in this market –
- F5 Networks Big-IP
- Radware Alteon
- Citrix (NetScaler)
While the world is moving more and more towards cloud apps, on-premise apps continue to be important, and CIOs need to manage hybrid portfolio of apps and still provide the best user experience they can to their employees, partners, and customers. One key aspect of this user experience is identity and access management, i.e. how do employees, partners, and customers login to their apps across deployments, devices, and platforms.
If you are already using one of these traditional ADCs in your data center, you can also leverage it to offer a unified access experience for your on-premise apps and facilitate a single sign-on and multi-factor authentication setup that’s consistent with your cloud apps.
This can be done by integrating Idaptive IDaaS with the ADC, wherein the ADC acts as SAML service provider and Idaptive as SAML identity provider as shown in the diagram below with F5 Big-IP APM as an example. F5 Big-IP APM is the access management product from the overall F5 Big-IP ADC platform.
This kind of configuration enables you to bring your legacy on-premise apps on par with cloud apps with regard to SSO and MFA, even if they don’t support standard protocols like SAML 2.0, OIDC, or OAuth, as F5 Big-IP can translate modern protocols to legacy protocols like Kerberos, NTLM, or header-based authentication. Thus, you can enjoy maximum possible protocol coverage by combining these products.
Additionally of course, you will be able to leverage Idaptive’s User Behavior Analytics to get real-time access insights to your on-premise and cloud apps, ML based adaptive MFA, Provisioning and Lifecycle Management to seamlessly manage lifecycle of users of on-premise apps, and Device Security Management to secure all types of endpoints used to access your on-premise apps.
One of our customers is leveraging this kind of setup to modernize access to dozens of on-premise apps and is also replacing some legacy IAM products with Idaptive. Contact us to know more!
Sumedh Inamdar
