A sneak peek at TouchPoint

By Leon Mallett January Tuesday, 2017 touchpoint No Comments

TouchPoint - an innovation in federation

The federated access model has become the mainstay for most enterprise IT environments for good reason. Centralising the authentication process provides more than just the user experience benefits of SSO, it brings the cloud back under control. Federation is the new control plane when it comes to IT security and management. The middleware model of having applications routing their authentication through the third party federation provider (IdP) allows identity services like IAM Cloud and our competitors to create added value features like multi-factor authentication and password reset. 

identity control.png

These features can be great, but they're designed for a specific function and have natural constraints. So what we decided to do was create a framework instead that would allow us, our partners and even our customers to build modular add-ons to the federation process. We call this framework TouchPoint. 

federation triangle.png

TouchPoint is the interface between the identity service and the user. But given that you have control over the identity service - it's actually the interface between your IT team and your users. The user needs to go through the federation process to be able to access their IT. So you have a captive audience. It's the perfect opportunity to get them to complete tasks you want them to. 

touchpoint flow.png

These are examples of the kind of flows you could achieve. But the possibilities really are endless. From payment gateways connecting to PayPal, to swipe card access, thousands of different types of MFA, attribute capture, compliance steps, training videos - basically anything. A TouchPoint module can be easily built in our framework to get your users to do anything you like. In fact - it doesn't even need to interact with the users actively, it could be a passive module... Want to log a certain type of user activity and get it to output the results into your custom reporting system? TouchPoint can do it for you. 

Pretty exciting huh? "Revolutionary" doesn't even capture how powerful TouchPoint could be for your organisation. So, now back to business - how do you get started? Well right now, we're wanting to keep TouchPoint under our control, so partners and customers will have to wait a little while longer before they start coding up their own modules without our support. But if you want a TouchPoint module building to accomplish a particular task (maybe you want to get your users to update a certain attribute like their address or phone number?), then we will build it for you to your specification. 

TouchPoint is available to all customers of IAM Cloud's identity and access platform. We have to be hosting your federation for TouchPoint to work, which we do for the majority of our customers anyway. If you have any questions, please just get in touch with our team. 

Contact us to get started with TouchPoint

 

Topics: touchpoint

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