iJet International: Transforming Identity Management for Increased Agility

iJet International provides customized risk management solutions, underpinned by intelligence, to global organizations for enhanced functionality and profitability. Their global intelligence experts monitor the world around the clock and empower their clients to respond to events such as natural disasters and political upheavals. The R&D at iJet is owned by their innovation arm, iJet Labs, who transformed their identity and access management (IAM) systems using WSO2’s IAM and API management capabilities. This transition was driven by a need to become more competitive, agile, and improve their business value for customers.

The pre-WSO2 days at iJet Labs were challenging if it were to be described in one word. A centralized IAM solution was absent and in its place, there were purpose-built custom applications. As the user base increased, scalability became difficult and iJet could not always meet their various customers’ exact requirements. iJet Labs understood that it was imperative to create a centralized solution, which can be delegated to their clients to help meet their requirements and give them greater control of managing their credentials. At the time, user provisioning was a manual process. Even though this process was functional for several years, it was not necessarily user-friendly - there were examples of users repeating this process multiple times as they needed to access different types of systems.

Adding to their list of challenges, the architecture was an issue. From its inception in 1999, iJet has continually added many applications to their architecture, built on a central database. Yet again scalability proved to be problematic, as an application had to be scaled in its entirety and this was time consuming (though possible). “We are a product company, it is very important for us to market our ideas from the product team within the shortest possible timeframe. We need that market advantage, and this legacy architecture made it too difficult for us to be competitive,” says Ismail Seyfi, Lead Software Architect at iJet Labs.

iJet upgraded their architecture using WSO2 capabilities and migrated their servers to a WSO2 managed cloud. As big advocates of open source, Alfresco, Liferay, GeoServer, and Apache applications also contribute to their architecture. The WSO2 IAM platform has replaced iJet’s custom-built user and access management system. This introduction did not disrupt any existing applications, which now use proxy-based authentication. WSO2’s API management platform has enabled iJet to write microservices and replace their monolithic applications.

iJet Labs’ aspirations were not solely limited to revising their architecture, there were several deployment goals in mind as well. They wanted to build and configure an environment where new products could be developed efficiently without causing any interference to other development projects in progress. This was achieved by using an iJet development stack (which separates environments, installs software, and integrates them into one environment), base installation of WSO2 products and automated configuration. Ansible was adopted as the infrastructure and configuration tool. The positive results have become evident at iJet International. The changes have allowed them to integrate environments efficiently, provide dedicated environments to each development stream, sync environments with production, eliminate manual changes, and provide a single source of truth for configurations.

Listen to iJet International’s presentation by Ismail Seyfi and Matt Barnes (Automation and Software Engineer, iJet) for an in-depth discussion of this project.

Find out more about using WSO2’s IAM and API management platforms for business agility.