Challenge

SAC has a website that provides a wide range of services for mountain sports enthusiasts. These include reservations for overnight stays in Alpine huts, course registrations, mountaineering products, insurance, etc. Statistically, SAC needs to manage over 500,000 identities and over 140,000 user roles. User experience is a key component of this website and SAC wanted to build a simplified one time registration and authorization mechanism that their website users can use with ease.

In order to build an identity management system and implement SSO, the team at SAC had to consolidate the various user stores and authorization systems. There were many existing ERP access rights that had to be integrated with the new system, along with additional identity providers.

Deployment and Approach

SAC needed a solution that was both open source, owing to greater flexibility, freedom from vendor lock-in, and the speed by which they can respond to any challenges or business requirements. Working together with Avintis SA - the WSO2 Value Added Reseller in Switzerland - SAC decided to use WSO2 Identity Server to implement their SSO solution. The API-driven WSO2 Identity Server enables enterprises to implement SSO and identity federation, and provides strong and adaptive authentication. This identity management solution comes with a central user store where all identities can be managed, thereby eliminating the requirement for distributed user management. Furthermore, WSO2 Identity Server is highly extensible and includes out-of-the-box protocols such as SAML 2.0 and OpenID Connect that simplify the integration of identity providers.