Identity management

Thursday 3rd March 2016

Identity management for organizations, institutions and businesses.

OpenAthens operates within the world of identity management and access management.

We provide seamless access for end-users, together with advanced management and security controls for organizations and publishers. Our powerful tools offer different, but complementary, services for each sector: identity management for institutions and information professionals and access management for publishers and product developers.

At the heart of what we do is the question: who are you?

Most organisations will have a central directory that stores usernames and password and manages individuals’ credentials. OpenAthens has the capability to connect with these directories and ensure that the familiar username and password become the one set of login details that powers the seamless, single sign on experience.

This creates a huge amount of benefit for the library and IT teams. The central directory is updated with changes of roles and there is no need to synchronise an alternative user directory. There is also no need to pass details over to publishers for activation within their own system.

This solves many administrative and bureaucratic burdens and ultimately saves time and adds clarity for information managers and publishers.

It creates “enterprise” single sign on using existing usernames and passwords.

We call this local authentication. The details of the different options for achieving this are available within this blog on Identity Management.

In some instances, organisations are happy to create a separate list of users who use library resources and facilities. It removes any need to connect with central IT technology and simplifies the need to meet licensing and subscription requirements. It places control firmly with the library – the OpenAthens administrative area is designed for easy use by all librarians and the management of user accounts. It is simple and straightforward to use.

The OpenAthens managed directory of end users and patrons creates a library specific username and password to establish single sign-on across e-resources and applications.

The benefits are the same: simple, seamless access for the end-user that saves the librarian the hassle of managing multiple credentials while providing insight and detail into the way the resources are used. Read our blog on Statistics and Intelligence.

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