Whitepaper: Federation Server vs. Open Source Toolkit

To give companies new to Secure Internet Single Sign-on (SSO) a better picture of the differences between a Standalone Server and Open Source Toolkit options, Ping Identity conducted a qualitative study of both implementation approaches. This paper introduces typical implementation steps, timelines, and a set of associated assumptions. The results are normalized against two federation scenarios: a "first federation" consisting of a single partner connection and a "federation at scale" scenario consisting of the deployment of ten partner connections.

Key Findings

•     "Zero cost"  toolkits often require significant expenditures in areas of maintenance, administration, documentation, and incremental coding.
•     Toolkits provide raw SAML object code for a limited set of profiles.
•     Full implementations still require development of application integration, clustering, attribute look-up, and security processing functions.
•     Large, complex, incremental coding effort, greatly increases attack plane and security risks of the toolkit approach.

At scale, a standalone federation server can speed total implementation time 5x faster than a toolkit approach.

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