Australian Rugby Union

Readify revamps ARU's Identity Services

The Australian Rugby Union (ARU) is responsible for the Australian national rugby team, the Wallabies, and the running of the game throughout Australia, through partnerships with the various state unions and local clubs and heavy investment in the future of the game through grass roots community programs and marketing efforts.

The Situation

The ARU had a number of disparate applications to support various elements of its activities. Each of these applications had its own identity system in place with individuals using multiple logins to access functionality.

The ARU's largest application, its public facing website at http://rugby.com.au, connects to a CRM system that stores all registered player information including contact details. The system is used for authentication and authorisation on the MyRugby portion of the website. Other ARU applications stored their own copies of individual information and performed their own separate authentication and authorisation processes.

The ARU has embarked on a process of streamlining and improving its information architecture in preparation for the next period of growth in both the expectations and demands of the general public in accessing rugby information and in the game itself. Due to various issues with managing identity across a diverse application portfolio, identity management was targeted as a key area to be addressed in the initial stages of the streamlining process.

Further to this, the ARU wanted to revise its authorisation model and move from 'group based' authorisation to 'claims based' authentication, enabling ARU to provide a more finely grained security structure as well as opening up possible federation options with other unions (e.g. SANZAR partners).

The Solution

The ARU has a strategic platform direction that is based on the Microsoft stack. At the time of embarking on this project, Microsoft codename 'Geneva' (now the Microsoft Identity Foundation) was still in pre-release mode, however the ARU (in conjunction with Readify), performed a proof of concept to test the feasibility of the solution and how it would work with legacy applications using older technologies such as classic ASP or Visual Basic 6 applications. Readify was chosen for this task due to their level of technical skill in working through issues, coupled with their ability to access to the right people within Microsoft to quickly resolve any technical issues that arose when working with pre-release software.

In conjunction with assistance from key Microsoft personnel, Readify created a proof of concept that was viable and showed that Windows Identity Foundation was a suitable technology choice for Identity management.

Readify then worked closely with the ARU to convert the proof of concept into a production ready identity service that could be used by all applications, complete with facilities to authorise users, manage passwords and identity cards (via CardSpaces), and provide claims that applications could use as required. For the various legacy applications that still relied on group based authorisation, the identity service provided group membership information as claims that they could then use.

The Benefits

Single Identity Platform and Strategic Investment

With Readify's help the ARU has been able to move to a single identity platform, whilst retaining the legacy hooks that existing applications require in order to continue functioning.

This has meant that changes in existing applications have been avoidable. Changes only need to be made in applications when it is deemed they should transition to a claims based security model. In addition to the move to the new identity platform and the switch to claims based authorisation, it has opened up a number of new architectural approaches that not only make securing sections of the application simpler but also enables easier personalisation of the user experience for rugby members.

Further to this, the ARU will no longer have to maintain user information for third parties given that the Windows Identity Foundation is an open platform. Federation with other security providers in the future is now eminently doable. Updates by third parties to users in their own identity store will be completely seamless to ARU applications where data sharing is required (such as SANZAR related web portals).

Minimal Disruptions to Regular Activities

Without the involvement of Readify, the move to a new identity platform would have taken much longer, been a much greater disruption for the rest of the team and put the strategic plan for the information systems re-architecture behind.

Readify also assisted the ARU by solving problems involved in seamlessly transitioning the ARU's existing user identities to the new identity platform (without resetting password or user accounts), eliminating end user disruption.

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For More Information

For more information about the Australian Rugby Union, visit the website at http://rugby.com.au/.

For more information about Readify products and services, call +61 3 9600 2339 or 1300 666 274 (within Australia) or visit the website at http://www.readify.net/.