A new topic in life - ForgeRock

It's been a while since I have written anything on my blog and the reason has been ForgeRock. In IT life, every two years you are introduced to a new game for which you have to learn the rules and play or else you will be sitting in the pavilion :)

Hence been a ForgeRock monkey from last 6 months hopping over the branches of OpenAM, OpenIDM & OpenDJ. I am not going to share my plan & feelings around this game but overall I quite liked it and hence I am writing a quick intro about ForgeRock technology in this blog.

ForgeRock

ForgeRock is a company providing Identity & access management solution via it’s multiple products called OpenAM, OpenIDM, OpenDJ, OpenIG & OpenUMA. Originally part of Sun but when taken over by Oracle, ForgeRock became a separate entity in itself. You can read more about this on wiki here.

For technical people, it is important to mention that it is a Java based product. Although not pure Java required most of the times but all customizations happens in server side JavaScript. And when we talk about Java, the remaining components automcatically switches from IIS to Apache & Tomcat. Windows to Linux and so on.

You can imagine how exciting my life would have been in last six months being a purely Microsoft guy and getting into all this. Anyways has been a good experience and all these bloody things are no longer a black box for me as well so let’s get into it.

OpenAM

OpenAM in ForgeRock’s family is responsible for access management like Authentication, SSO, adaptive risk, federation and all. It is highly scalable, modular & customizable product. You can read about OpenAM here.

OpenIDM

OpenIDM is Identity management. This one gives you out of the box functionalities around various use cases of identity management like user provisioning to backend systems, user self service, work flows around different processes & since now-a-days everything is in cloud, it gives you connectors for various SAAS products like Google, SalesForce & Office 365. You can read more about it here.

OpenDJ

And as we need some sort of database or directory in all applications. We have OpenDJ for this in ForgeRock stack. OpenDJ provide directory services with high performance, scalability & availability. You can read about this here.

OpenIG

This is a new member in ForgeRock stack and basically can act as a identity gateway for you legacy applications, APIs providing lots of out of the box functionalities like password capture and replay, API security etc. Read more about this here.

OpenUMA

Again this is a new addition in ForgeRock stack which is User managed Access. Quite powerful when I saw the demo of this but we aren’t using it so far. Read more about this here.

These are all the products which ForgeRock has to offer for identity and access management. So far using it, a good thing I can say about it is “it is highly customizable”. A bad thing I have to say about it is “it is highly customizable”. The problem is, everything is customizable and you have to configure it which makes you feel like you have been forced to sit in the cockpit of Boeing 747 without a manual.

But still, a good product if used in right environment & infrastructure by right people. I will share few of the use cases of what you can do with all these OpenAM, IDM & DJ in my blogs soon along with Microsoft stuff. Yes, I am not going to leave Microsoft Azure & whatever I used to do :)