Imagine having to provide authentication and authorization services for some 1,000 departments within your organization, while giving about 360,000 administrators control over which individuals get access to what resources. Now imagine that the vast majority of those groups and administrators work for companies other than your own. That is essentially what Sabre Holdings has to deal with to give its clients access to the array of travel services and data that Sabre provides. Sabre Holdings, which spun out of American Airlines, provides travel services such as reservations for airlines, travel-related businesses and, through its Travelocity unit, to consumers. During a presentation at the recent Network World IT Roadmap Conference in Dallas, Kurtis Holland, principal, IT security for Sabre, explained the steps the company has taken over the years to enable an extensive identity management capability on open systems. "Our main goal is to offload legacy services from our mainframe environment and to maintain the same level of control for authentication,authorization and accountability"Holland said in a follow-up interview. "That's a big challenge, considering we peak at 1.5 million transactions per minute across our enterprise -about 25,900 per second - many of which are based on identity transactions."
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