A novel architecture for identity management system using virtual appliance technology

Identity management system has gained significance for any organization today for not only storing details of its employees but securing its sensitive information and safely managing access to its resources. This system being an enterprise based application has time taking deployment process, involving many complex and error prone steps. Also being globally used, its continuous running on servers lead to large carbon emissions. This paper proposes a novel architecture that integrates the Identity management system together with virtual appliance technology to reduce the overall deployment time of the system. It provides an Identity management system as pre-installed, pre-configured and ready to go solution that can be easily deployed even by a common user. The proposed architecture is implemented and the results have shown that there is decrease in deployment time and decrease in number of steps required in previous architecture. The hardware required by the application is also reduced as its deployed on virtual machine monitor platform, which can be installed on already used servers. This contributes to the green computing practices and gives costs benefits for enterprises. Also there is ease of migration of system from one server to another and the enterprises which do not want to depend on third party cloud for security and cost reasons, can easily deploy their identity management system in their own premises.