As an IAM Administrator and security professional, your time and expertise are in high demand. You maintain complex configurations in a variety of different tools and interfaces and serve as the central point-of-contact for many groups within your organization. With a growing list of demands from business and system administrators, application developers, and compliance representatives, and the inability to delegate to those who lack your expertise, it can be difficult to keep up.

PingCentral:

  • Allows application owners to add user authentication and authorization support to their applications and promote them to development environments themselves.
  • Removes many common application configuration and deployment tasks from your long list of responsibilities, which will lower operational costs, reduce bottlenecks, and allow you to focus on the more complex elements of your job.
  • Provides a central monitoring location for greater visibility into applications across deployment life cycles.
  • Minimizes the risk of promoting applications with vulnerable security policies and make it easier to standardize policies across the applications within your organization.

Extensive training is not required to use PingCentral. However, for the best possible experience, become familiar with how the platform works, and the mechanics behind the template creation and environment promotion processes, before getting started.

How PingCentral works

Being a PingFederate expert, you enjoy building complex configurations and look forward to learning about the latest and greatest security technology available. However, most application owners do not feel the same way.

The vast majority of application owners do not know (or want to know) anything about OAuth, OIDC, or SAML. All they want to do is find the simplest and most straightforward way to support user authentication and authorization within their applications. They would prefer that someone like you handle all of that for them.

Application owners also need to test their applications in a variety of different environments before they are promoted to production. Promoting, testing, and tweaking can be time-consuming, and even more so if they have to rely on someone else to promote their applications for them.

Here’s how it works:

  • In PingCentral, you set up development environments and users.
  • In PingFederate, you locate clients and connections that have best-practice security configurations worthy of replicating in new applications.
  • In PingCentral, you create standardized OAuth, OIDC, and SAML SP templates based on best-practice configurations.
  • In PingCentral, application owners use your templates to create new OAuth, OIDC, and SAML SP applications. A wizard guides them through the process of providing a name and description for each application they create, and environment-specific information that makes it possible to run the application on the target environment.

OIDC client and SAML connection authentication can only occur if PingFederate is correctly configured. Refer to OIDC connection orchestration and SAML connection orchestration to see which PingFederate components are used to authenticate clients and connections in PingCentral.