Solution Brief: Secure Access to AWS for Suppliers and Partners

You’ve built an application on AWS; now you need to secure it. You need a way for suppliers and partners from around the world to securely gain access to the data that only pertains to them.  Under the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, AWS manages security of the cloud, while security in the cloud is the responsibility of the customer. 

Read this solution brief to find out how to allow users from partner organisations to access your services through Okta while minimising administrative overhead and avoiding security issues related to the synchronisation of identities and passwords. 

For more on securing customer and partner portals, read this whitepaper.

Challenge

Securing Access to Cloud Apps for Suppliers and Partners

You’ve built an application on AWS; now you need to secure it. You need a way for suppliers and partners from around the world to securely gain access to the data that only pertains to them.

Take, for example, a clothing brand. The clothing brand provides retail partners access to their inventory data through an application running on AWS. Stores that carry the brand need to access the application daily. The brand needs a secure way to ensure that when a store in Idaho accesses their application, they won’t be able to access data pertaining to a store in Florida. As organisations extend their technology to partners to realise business benefits, the importance of security cannot be overlooked.

Under the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, AWS manages security of the cloud, while security in the cloud is the responsibility of the customer. Customers retain control of Identity and Access Management (IAM) as part of the security they choose to implement to protect their own content, platform, applications, systems, and networks, no differently than they would for applications in an on-site data centre. As you’ll see in the diagram below, Okta fills a significant slot in the security of your cloud or hybrid environment.

In today’s tech-centric business world, security can’t be ignored. But security solutions aren’t all created equal. You need a managed service that is specifically built to run on the cloud—one that’s easy to administer and doesn’t create friction for users.

The Okta Solution

Streamlining Secure Access to Your Applications

Many supplier offerings in this space share a lot of common ground, however in a B2B context there are some specific requirements that can make the difference in terms of roll out and adoption.

Okta uses SAML or Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) to streamline and secure access to your applications on AWS as well as other AWS services such as AWS Lambda or Amazon API Gateway. Information about a user can be accessed from Active Directory, LDAP or a partner’s IdP and can be transmitted to Amazon API Gateway.

Allowing users from the partner organisations to access your services through Okta can minimise administrative overhead and avoid security issues related to the synchronisation of identities and passwords. Additional safeguards such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) can be implemented optionally.

Okta and AWS

Okta was born and built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It leverages several AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), and Amazon CloudFront and is architected over multiple regions and Availability Zones (AZs), making it reliable and highly available. AWS takes care of the security of the cloud. Okta helps secure your applications and data in the cloud. That leaves you free to focus on building awesome products.

Get started and learn more about Okta on AWS: https://www.okta.com/partners/aws/