Name: Understanding Federation Essentials in SAP Customer Data Cloud
Uploaded: 2019-7-2
Duration: 287 s

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<div><div><div>In this video, you'll learn the basics of Federation in SAP Customer Data Cloud. Why use federation and what are its drawbacks. The video ends with a use case where a user purchase tickets from an event ticket reseller while logging in with their club credentials.<br><div><br>Visit SAP Customer Data Cloud documentation for more details: <br><a href="https://developers.gigya.com/display/GD/Authentication+Methods#AuthenticationMethods-Federation" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://developers.gigya.com/display/GD/Authentication+Methods#AuthenticationMethods-Federation</a><a href="https://developers.gigya.com/display/GD/Authentication+Methods#AuthenticationMethods-Federation" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> </a><br><br>Click <a href="https://www.sap.com/community/topics/customer-data-cloud.html" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here</a> to visit the SAP Customer Data Cloud Community Page.</div></div></div></div>

Understanding Federation Essentials in SAP Customer Data Cloud

Welcome to SAP Customer Data Cloud Federation videos. Whether you are technical or not, it is important to understand the concept behind Federation. During this session, we will introduce the concept of federated identity as well as review a simple and typical use case. Let's start with the concept. Customer Data Cloud or CDC, is a customer identity and access management solution, meaning it allows end users to authenticate or login to your platform, then saves their identities and authentication options. Users want to authenticate as quickly and easily as possible without being forced to remember multiple or complex passwords, as described in the diagram. Federation allows multiple applications to request user authentication from a single centralized identity source. From a user perspective, it improves the experience in that they can use a single set of credentials to connect to multiple applications. Also, if it suits your business needs, you can implement single sign on, allowing a user that's connected to the purple application to connect to the blue application without having to authenticate. Saving them the additional hassle and providing you with a 360 degree view of customer engagement with your apps. Saml and Oidc are the two open standards used to implement Federation and CDC. Using Open Standard allows identity management and user access to be implemented with reduced effort across a variety of applications, including mobile, web, IoT and others. Another common challenge, especially for business to business use cases, is access management. Using a central identity provider gives the ability to centralize authorization management instead of implementing individual solutions for each application. Different users can access the same system, but with different rights. For example, you would understand how a manager and their direct reports would have access to the same HR system, but the manager would view information about their direct reports that no one else can see. If the client maintains roles in the identity provider and the right mapping is in place with the service provider or application, then it can be used by the service provider in order to give the right level of access to a user based on the role. Having the ability to centralize authentication and authorization. Allow simplification of provisioning and maintenance. Client SDKs simplify the implementation of registration and login flows, and is very commonly used by customers to benefit from out of the box functionality. On the other hand, G connector makes the integration of CDC and customer management system or e-commerce platform easy. Although the use of an industry open standard has benefits, it also has many drawbacks. First, neither SDKs nor connectors, nor many other out of the box functionality can be leveraged. Also, as opposed to the application using the CDC SDKs. Federation relies on multiple redirects between the site, the proxy page, the login page, and potentially the consent page, which could impact the user experience negatively. A user could become suspicious about the site security when being redirected to a page, which is under a different domain than the original application site. When deciding to use federation, it is vital to understand the impact and bring it to the attention of the stakeholders. Now let's review a typical use case where federation is a good fit. Event resellers would typically advertise tickets on behalf of many organizers. Here you can see how a user would browse sports events like football games, tennis tournaments and Formula one race weekends with the intention of buying a ticket for the event. Here, the user has decided to go and watch a football game, added the tickets to the shopping basket and is ready for checkout. At checkout, the user can be given the option to complete the purchase by logging in using their football club account. This would allow a fast checkout for the user, as well as better knowledge of the fan base to the club, which can be used to drive further engagement. The reseller can then issue the ticket to the user, and the football club could personalize the experience by sending further communications about the event, team, etc.. Of course, this would require appropriate consent from the user. Now the user could have decided to buy a ticket to go to a formula one race weekend, and in that case, it would not be relevant to ask the user to complete the checkout using their football club account. Instead, the user can be given the option to authenticate via the F1 team advertising the event and get the right personalized experience. Using federation allows for a simple implementation of such use cases, as it provides sufficient functionality to meet business requirements and it simplifies the onboarding of new event organizers as identity providers by reducing it to a configuration step rather than a more expensive implementation.