The Lighthouse service is designed to offer all the major capabilities typically found in an access management software package meant to be installed internally, including the ability to provision accounts for new users, the capability to drop an account when an employee leaves the firm, and single sign-on so employees only have to log in once to use multiple applications.
By offering identity management as a service, Lighthouse can manage employees who access organizational resources from outside the firewall, or employees who use non-organizational issued computers and devices, a common scenario among organisations that embrace the bring-your-own-device philosophy.
Sharing
Lighthouse also offers federation services, allowing an organisation to share parts of its identity management database with other organizations, and a self-service console for users to register themselves.
Lighthouse Gateway can be used with IBM’s own identity and access management suite to provide identity management outside the firewall. In fact, the IBM and Lighthouse technologies have already been deployed together for a number of customers, Lovejoy said.
The service “provides a lot of automation,” especially around the process of managing identities and services outside the organisation, with customers and business partners, Lovejoy said.
For instance, an automobile manufacturer may have different multiple websites for its customers: one for new car purchases, one for ordering parts and another one for service calls. In this scenario, the Lighthouse “technology allows you to federate identities where customers can get access to you in a single way, and your business partners can get access to your customers in a seamless way,” Lovejoy said.
Lighthouse Security Group was a subsidiary of Lighthouse Computer Service, an enterprise system integrator that has been a longtime business partner of IBM.
Terms of the deal were not announced.
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