Verizon Wireless on Improving Security and User Experience with Sun Access Manager

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: