Executive Summary

What was found

Majority of the users are on the legacy product.
The legacy product is an on-premise product.
Customers aren't necessarily the most tech savvy.
Legacy products have a handy component that could make it forward compatible with the new product.

To retain the customers, we have to bring them to the new cloud based product which is currently being developed and supported.
Customers's authentication data needs to be ported to the new product for a seamless transition experience.

To build the proof of concept to show that this transition can be done.
Successfully built the proof of concept involving multiple moving parts, and came up with 3 ways customers could port their data.

RSA Security was the security division of Dell EMC. I worked on their SecurID authentication product.
RSA had many customers in their legacy product called AxM (Access Manager).
Their new product was SecurID Access, which was a cloud based authentication product.
The objective was to see how we could help the legacy customers port their authentication data to SecurID seamlessly.
Such an offering would enable more flexibility to the customers as they could authenticate their users globally.

AxM used Apache to get input from the user and authenticate through the servers installed on the system.
The key was to realise that we don't need an entirely new server side code to use SecurID's services.
We modified AxM's code such that it forwarded requests to SecurID, instead of the servers on premise.
The result was a simplified software code that had 33% less moving parts than the proposed design.
This simplification meant fewer lines of code, hence fewer breaks and failures. This also meant low development cost.

This was the search phase, where we were looking for ways to efficiently build the robust product.

Human = User
Robot = AxM (The Old Product)
Black Computer = On prem authentication servers that AxM talks to, to authenticate, which was not to be used anymore.
Red Square = Web Browser Component proposed to connect SecurID
Red Cloud = SecurID Access Cloud (The New Product)
Green Lock = Protected resource the User is trying to access
This architecture used 3 steps to accomplish the task.
Step 1 Make the old product talk to a web server component.
Step 2 build the web server component to talk to the new product.
Step 3 based on the result, authenticate the User to the protected resource.
Protocols and Tools
1 used C C++ HTTP UNIX
2 used C# .NET cURL JSON
3 used Javascript HTML

This was the implementation phase, where we implemented the efficient way to build the robust product.

Human = User
Half Red Robot = AxM (The Old Product) modified to directly talk to SecurID
Black Computer = On prem authentication servers that AxM talks to, to authenticate, which was not to be used anymore.
Red Cloud = SecurID Access Cloud (The New Product)
This was the architecture we built, it excluded an entire component, making the design more simple as it involved less moving parts.
Developed architecture was a working AxM talking to SecurID -> Access to resource.
This architecture used 2 steps to accomplish the task.
Step 1 The old product talks directly to a new product, eliminating the need for a web server component.
Step 2 based on the result, authenticate the User to the protected resource.
Protocols and Tools
1 used C C++ HTTP UNIX C# .NET cURL JSON XACML
2 used Javascript HTML