Superpatterns

Last November, at the Gartner Identity and Access Management Summit 2008 in Orlando, FL, Damo Bashyam of Verizon Wireless (VZW) gave a presentation titled 'Simplify Identity Management to Improve Security and Online Customer Experience'; Daniel just pinged me to say that this presentation is now online, along with the associated slides, and what a presentation it is!

If you're looking for marketecture, then move on; if you want to know how the largest wireless telecommunications network in the United States is using Access Manager (the old name for OpenSSO Enterprise) in a high-scale, high-availability deployment, then it's all here, in just 23 minutes. Some of the numbers are staggering: over 40,000,000 users, 1,000,000 logins per day, peaking at 4,000 logins per minute. VZW deployed Access Manager into two data centers, with session failover within each data center and multi-master replication between six Sun Directory Server instances.

The preso and slides detail all this and the business benefits to VZW - for me, given my focus on federation, one highlight was the fact that they have extended single sign-on to 25 third-party application service providers (ASPs), 12 of them in a single night with just 4 hours (planned) downtime for the cutover. Another interesting aspect is that this is a Sun stack, top-to-bottom, so VZW have just one throat to choke in the event of an issue, with no intra-vendor finger pointing. Damo describes it as a partnership - one that has brought real and lasting benefits for both partners.

So... go download the slides, make yourself a nice cup of tea, and spend a few minutes watching the preso: