“The Adventures of Antti Pilvinen” - A story by the RoarinPenguin
DISCLAIMER: All facts, people and companies in this story are fictional and do not have links with any real situation.
“I admit that when you invited me for a walk on the frozen sea to discuss business I expected a somewhat mystic experience… but I wasn’t certainly expecting THIS! I am literally enchanted!” exclaimed Claudio Nuvolari, Alliance Manager of CloudyBiz SpA.
Surely Antti Pilvinen knew how to impress his business partners with drops of typical Finnish beauty. After a long business lunch with Claudio (Italians are amazingly talkative and they simply love these endless lunches, where important business discussions can take place), Antti proposed a different experience.
“Instead of going back to the office to continue the discussion, let’s enjoy these few hours of sun and have a walk on the frozen sea, he offered.”
“Uhmmm…” mumbled Claudio, “isn’t it a bit cold outside?”
“Well, -12 celsius is just normal for February here and the sun is shining outside,” commented Antti. Then, with a subtle smile on his face, he added, “and I doubt you have ever seen a 3pm sunset on the frozen sea… you might find it beautiful!”
“All right, you convinced me. After all we don’t need laptops and dashboards to continue our interesting discussion” said Claudio.
15 minutes later, they were strolling in the middle of the sea near Espoo, where the ASPF headquarters were located. They admired the incredible lights of the winter sunset ranging from dark blues to insanely bright oranges and reds – in a word, spectacular!
That day was very important for Antti’s company, since a partnership with this Italian cloud computing service provider would mean a significant boost in business.
CloudyBiz was an Italian leading CRM services provider to an incredible number of small and medium size companies all over Europe. The recent dramatic growth of demand raised critical security concerns about access to the solution. Customers started to ask more about the security of their access and strong authentication, each one wanting a different authentication approach. Some love digital certificates, some dream for a one-time password, others ask for Active Directory integration, while some still have Novell eDirectory and would like to use it for authentication purposes (you know, customers take it always to extreme).
When Antti said ASPF might have a solution, Claudio immediately became interested and agreed to a meeting.
Antti started to talk about their solution. He mentioned, “two years ago we included in our offering solutions from an interesting Finnish vendor, Stonesoft.”
“Oh yes, I have heard of them,” commented Claudio. “They are the company that proposed a clustering solution for other vendors… stonedance, stone… beat, yes, StoneBeat was the name!”
“Of course,” continued Antti, “that was many years ago. However, now their offering has evolved into an advanced network security platform called StoneGate, which includes an identity and access management solution called StoneGate SSL VPN.”
“This could be a very good solution to CloudyBiz’s needs, because it supports over 25 different authentication methods and I’m pretty sure it includes the ones your customers are asking for.”
“Hmmm,” mumbled Claudio, “could be, but sometimes the customers are really reluctant in relying on CloudyBiz for user authentication… or in some cases they have hundreds of users already defined, and they don’t want to force these users to have yet another account and password to maintain and remember!”
“This is very true and understandable,” continued Antti, “that’s why we very often propose this solution in a federated authentication fashion: the basic idea is that users keep authentication at home and once it is successful, they will have access to the cloud in a secured way, providing only that bit of information (for example email address or mobile number) to identify the user profile and provide single sign-on to applications. I’m sure I can ask Juhani Kiviportti, our techie guru, to show you how it works. This is a very interesting and powerful solution.”
“It seems indeed,” exclaimed Claudio, “so now let’s go back to your office as it’s getting dark… and a bit cold for my tastes… we can see if Juhani is available and see this marvel in action”.
A few weeks later, CloudyBiz SpA announced a new security option in their offering with an amazingly funny advertising campaign having the following slogan:
“Spaghetti and reindeers: securing access to your CRM!”
written by RoarinPenguin - 551 views
\\ tags: authentication, Federated ID, The Adventures of Antti Pilvinen
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