Infosys deploys central identity and access management platform based on Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift

Need for a Central identity platform

User experience is a critical factor in successful digital transformation. It is also vital for delivering customer satisfaction. Azure Active Directory solution has been the backbone of identity management platform within Infosys catering to all enterprise customers accessing various apps. In line with constant innovation, Infosys was looking to extend seamless and personalized digital experience to its customers, partners, vendors, job aspirants and other external stakeholders to access Infosys’ value-added services.

This required a highly secure end-to-end cloud-native and platform-agnostic identity platform that can broker the access across applications.

Being a single instance one, the erstwhile solution could not handle higher loads and was prone to failure. Performance was a challenge, and users were unable to have uninterrupted authentication across multiple applications with a single set of login credentials.

Paving the way with Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift

After evaluating various options, Infosys decided to adopt Keycloak hosted on Microsoft Azure Red Hat OpenShift container platform. Having worked with Microsoft earlier, Infosys preferred the end-to-end solutioning and effectiveness of Microsoft services.

Microsoft and Infosys worked together to build an extensible solution that Infosys customized to its requirements by building Service Principal Interfaces (SPIs) and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The team at Infosys built multiple authentication and authorization workflows. This enabled users to login using various social credentials. They also enabled password-less and multi-factor authentication via mobile devices and SMS. External users now have the flexibility to choose from various authentication flows that the solution provides thereby providing better usability and a seamless Single Sign On experience.

In Infosys’ words, given their positive experiences with Microsoft solutions in the past, they believed that Opting for Azure RedHat OpenShift would provide faster time to market and substantially decrease operational overheads compared to self-managed orchestration platforms.

Since Microsoft offered an integrated solution meeting most of their requirements, they decided to go ahead with it. The platform has offered great flexibility in customization, and they have developed SPIs and APIs on top of it for easy integration with various applications.

The identity platform was implemented in 15 days. By allowing external users to access Infosys’ value-added services, it has delivered substantial benefits -

Seamless access – The platform has facilitated smooth access across applications with one-time authentication leading to a better digital experience for external stakeholders and employees, thereby improving productivity.

Ashvini Kumar Upadhyay, Principal Technology Architect, Infosys, says,” The Central identity management platform for external users is a transformative solution that has enhanced user experience and security for our apps and services. It enables smooth authentication across multiple applications for different stakeholders."

He further says, " We have tailored it to suit most of our needs and created APIs and SPIs on top of it to make it more adaptable. The simplicity of supporting various Auth flow configurations allows developing different Auth types for different scenarios.”

Scalability – A fundamental benefit across the organization spanning many applications was the potential to scale. With the cloud application, Infosys could easily add users and services with a few clicks without affecting performance. Since the implementation, there has been zero downtime. The system is highly fault tolerant and resilient.

Improved performance – The ARO cluster has been seamlessly able to scale to support millions of users, who have moved into the new solution. This is now able to process over 200K transactions on daily basis, with over 10k+ concurrent sessions.

Muthukumar Subramanian, Principal Consultant, Infosys, says, “The Central identity management platform is fast and efficient and is easy to maintain and deploy. It supports customization and ease of it to deploy and extend it. We liked that the platform had robust monitoring features for better operations and support and helped us build a strong security layer.”

He underlines, “Being a critical platform, this would require running 24X7 all through the year without any hiccups and it is living up to the expectation.”

Robust security – One of the crucial requirements of Infosys was security in the wake of the rising threat of cyberattacks. Azure Red Hat OpenShift has built-in security features for automated security maintenance and ongoing monitoring. This allows Infosys to scale securely and focus on value-driven tasks. Moreover, it integrates well with the existing security layer, thus helping Infosys stay one step ahead of security challenges.

According to Infosys, the identity platform for external users represents a significant breakthrough, greatly improving user experience within the company. It provides seamless authentication across multiple applications for various stakeholders and achieves high performance levels with minimal network congestion.

As Vipindas Vazhuthakkadu, Industry Principal, Infosys, puts it, “The Central identity management platform is comprehensive and fulfils almost all the specified needs with respect to deployment and manageability. In addition, the enterprise support allows us to resolve any unexpected issue fast and effectively.”

Vipindas adds, “Furthermore, the platform is verified for security and compatibility by RHSSO and therefore we can rely on the upgrades that ensure us the complete security.”

Providing a frictionless digital experience that is secure and scalable

Following the vision of Live Enterprise, which is to transform itself to be agile, responsive, and adaptable, at scale, Infosys wants to build a multi-region topology for ARO clusters and onboard more than 100 apps into this identity platform . This is to ensure that user requests can be redirected to the closest location. It will enable quicker responses and bring a balance between user experience and security – providing a seamless authentication for every user.