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What’s SCIM?
Part I
If you are not familiar with what’s SCIM then you come to the right place to get a basic understanding of this terminology. SCIM stands for System for Cross-domain Identity Management. As the name suggests it provides a standard method for linking your systems together to make managing identities in cloud-based applications and services much easier.
The first version, SCIM 1.0, was released in 2011 by a SCIM standard working group organized under the Open Web Foundation. In 2011, it was transferred to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and the current standard, SCIM 2.0, was released as IETF RFC in 2015.
So SCIM plays a major role from those days until now when comes to identity provisioning.
What’s Identity Provisioning?
In simple terms, creation, maintenance, and deactivation of user accounts,
in one or more systems or applications, in response to automated or interactive business processes can be elucidated as identity provisioning.
Earlier days in the traditional approach multiple redundant integration efforts from Enterprise Cloud Subscriber (ECS) to Cloud Service Providers (CSP) were done as below image.
Instead of maintaining multiple connectors as above, SCIM uses a simple protocol that everyone agrees on as below.
Benefits of SCIM Provisioning
- Standardization of provisioning
- Centralization of identity
- Automation of onboarding and offboarding
- More comprehensive SSO management
- Admins no longer need to manually create and delete user accounts in web apps which saves them valuable time and reduces the chance for errors in the authorization levels granted to users.
In the next part of this series of articles, we will look into use cases of SCIM.
