Identity Management Services

Overview

Identity Management Services is responsible for:

The identification, authentication, and authorization infrastructure (IAA) at the Lawrence and Edwards campuses;
Central resources computer account creation and management;
Data provisioning into enterprise and department systems.

To perform these functions, we aggregate information from various university databases of record, creating a "registry" database from which business logic can make decisions about authorizations and roles in the university.

This registry, along with the business logic used to interpret it, is called a "metadirectory". This metadirectory, known as AIMS (Account and Identity Management System) along with the LDAP directory service it provisions, and associated group and authorization databases, provide our enterprise directory at KU.

We use the Enterprise Directory to provision our Exchange address book, our Blackboard courses, our Exchange distribution lists, and many other systems.

Click to see an Identity Management Architecture diagram. The systems listed are not a complete listing, but are suggestive of the types of systems.

Yes, there should be something about PKI on these pages. It will come.