How to Set Up Business Partner Federation

Business Partner Federation establishes a trust relationship between the Service Provider (SP) and Identity Provider (IDP) using SAML tokens. By establishing this trust relationship, you can provide access to the resources that you want to share. You can federate to the following partners:

• Integrating with Microsoft Azure Active Directory

• Integrating with Idaptive tenants

• Integrating with Okta

• Integrating two IBM Security tenants

There are two use cases for Business Partner Federation as follows:

• Shared Tenant

• Tenant-to-Tenant

Shared Tenant

In this use case, you share your IBM Security tenant with your business partners. Your IBM Security tenant (which hosts the services/applications) serves as the SP and your partner serves as the IDP. Your business partners access the tenant and its associated resources/applications by passing a SAML token obtained from their IDP service. This use case applies to any IDP (AD FS or other kinds of IDPs).

Tenant-to-Tenant

This case is sometimes referred to as “tenant to tenant” because both the SP and IDP are IBM Security tenants. Your business partners access the resources/applications by passing a SAML token obtained from their IBM Security IDP tenant to their IBM Security SP tenant.