Cloud Identity Patterns and Strategies

Get to grips with identity patterns and design a structured enterprise identity model for cloud applications

Key Features

• Learn all you need to know about different identity patterns and implementing them in real-world scenarios
• Handle multi-IDP-related common situations no matter how big your organization
• Gain practical insights into OAuth implementation patterns and flows

Book Description

Identity is paramount for every architecture design, making it crucial for enterprise and solutions architects to understand the benefits and pitfalls of implementing identity patterns. However, information on cloud identity patterns is generally scattered across different sources and rarely approached from an architect’s perspective, and this is what Cloud Identity Patterns and Strategies aims to solve, empowering solutions architects to take an active part in implementing identity solutions.

Throughout this book, you’ll cover various theoretical topics along with practical examples that follow the implementation of a standard de facto identity provider (IdP) in an enterprise, such as Azure Active Directory. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll explore the different factors that contribute to an enterprise's current status quo around identities and harness modern authentication approaches to meet specific requirements of an enterprise. You’ll also be able to make sense of how modern application designs are impacted by the company’s choices and move on to recognize how a healthy organization tackles identity and critical tasks that the development teams pivot on.

By the end of this book, you’ll be able to breeze through creating portable, robust, and reliable applications that can interact with each other.

What you will learn

• Understand the evolution of identity in the enterprise
• Discover basic to advanced OAuth patterns and implementations
• Find out how OAuth standards are usually adopted in the enterprise
• Explore proven solutions for modern identity challenges
• Use Azure AD for implementing identity solutions
• Comprehend how company structure and strategies influence design decisions

Who this book is for

This book is for cloud security engineers and identity experts. Enterprise architects, tech leads, developers, and anyone who wants to learn how to use identity patterns and strategies to build identity models for the modern cloud era will find this book useful. This book covers many DevOps and Agile principles; although not a pre-requisite, familiarity with these topics would be helpful.

Table of Contents

1. Walkthrough of Digital Identity in the Enterprise
2. The Cloud Era and Identity
3. OAuth 2.0 and OIDC
4. Authentication Flows
5. Exploring Identity Patterns
6. Trends in API Authentication
7. Identity Providers in the Real World
8. Real-World Identity Provider – A Zoom-In on Azure Active Directory
9. Exploring Real-World Scenarios

Giuseppe Di Federico started working for Microsoft in 2011, with previous experience working for IBM and Accenture in software development. He became an architect for cloud and hybrid solutions, serving customers in more than 10 countries across EMEA. He had the opportunity to lead multicultural teams, visit many multinational customers, and learn about different cultures, mindsets, and assets, which enabled him to also appreciate how organizations’ structures impact their results. During his experience, he has been able to appreciate many identity patterns designed to last, to be reliable and secure. In June 2022, he accepted the challenge to join a new leading-edge team for the greatest service company in Italy.

Fabrizio Barcaroli (born in 1987) started his career as a consultant in Italy after obtaining a master’s degree in computer science in 2012. In 2013, Fabrizio joined Microsoft as part of the Microsoft Consulting Services unit, where he developed his technical skills and helped customers achieve their business goals through the usage of Microsoft technologies. With the rise of the cloud era, Fabrizio specialized in cloud and identity solutions, and in 2020, he became a cloud solution architect, a technical advisor that helps close the gap between business needs and Microsoft technologies for big enterprises operating in the manufacturing, finance, and retail markets in Italy and across the globe.