Lee Learns

SCIM and identity providers

A lot of enterprises use SCIM -- system for cross-domain identity management -- for handling the tedious and complex actions of creating accounts for employees across a variety of services.

For example, if you join a new company, you will likely need a few accounts:

To provision all of these accounts can be tedious work, and hard to keep track of. What happens when an employee leaves? You certainly don't want to keep their accounts active.

SCIM is a solution to handle this kind of stuff.

Rather than manually creating and syncing accounts, a company can use an identity provider such as Okta or Active Directory, that speaks SCIM.

There are integrations for each app (Gmail, Slack, Zoom, Workday, etc) that

Flow

Let's assume we are using Okta as our identity provider.

  1. Create a new user in Okta -- Okta is aware of all the apps our company uses
  2. Okta provisions accounts in each of the apps -- SCIM allows this to be

If you are developing an HR application and you want to sell it, it would be crucial to implement SCIM endpoints so that it can easily be plugged in to identity providers.

Content-Type: application/scim+json is a thing.

#security