Portal security architecture

In order to support the strategic goals for SSO for portal, a phased approach was set by the portal governance. For the overall security, user management, and associated capabilities, a full-blown security model was designed and implemented to serve the core banking, call center, and the enterprise as a whole. Both portal initiatives needed to have portal security integrated into the desktop for customer service representatives and brokers.

The requirement, in a nutshell, is that when the bank user would log on to his/her Windows-based machine, he/she should be immediately logged on to portal, avoiding re-entry of credentials. So, even though enterprise-wide, this SSO was scheduled for the second phase of the project, a desktop SSO realm and a portal SSO realm had to be created to deliver this first piece of functionality. For simplicity's sake, we will illustrate the runtime architecture for the security layer as follows:

As we can see in the illustration shown...