CA AuthMinder Administration Guide › Overview of the Administration Console › Next Steps: Quick Administration › For Complex Deployments

For Complex Deployments

In larger enterprises, where the deployments are complex and high availability is a must, AuthMinder can be implemented to provide strong authentication for the large user base, as well as administrators who manage the system. In these deployments, AuthMinder components are installed on different servers. This is done for security, performance, high availability, and/or to enable multiple applications to use the strong-authentication capability.

Note: See "Planning the Deployment" in the CA AuthMinder Installation and Deployment Guide for more information on this type of deployments.

The following table summarizes the typical characteristics of this deployment type:

The quick overview of the steps to set up and start managing strong authentication for your users is:

1. Ensure that AuthMinder is installed and configured properly and that you have deployed the WAR files for the Administration Console and User Data Service.

   Note: See the CA AuthMinder Installation and Deployment Guide for more information on installing AuthMinder, deploying the WAR files, and performing other post-installation tasks.

2. Log in to the Administration Console as MA (see "Accessing the Administration Console") and follow the steps in the Bootstrap wizard to initialize the system.

   Note: See "Bootstrapping the System" in the CA AuthMinder Installation and Deployment Guide for more information.

3. Configure the Administration Console settings, which include UDS settings, global organization settings, Administration Console cache settings, and the basic username-password authentication for logging in to the Console.

   See "Configuring Administration Console Settings" for more information.

4. Set up AuthMinder Server instances on different systems.

   See "Setting Up Server Instances" for more information.

5. Configure the protocols that Administration Console, SDKs, and Web Services use to communicate to AuthMinder Server.

   See "Configuring Communication Protocols" for more information.

6. Plan and create organizations. The organization architecture is flat and each organization that you create can map to a business unit in your enterprise.

   See "Creating and Activating Organizations" for more information.

7. Plan and create the administrators (see "Creating Administrators") and custom roles (see "Working with Custom Roles"), if required.
8. Create appropriate Credential Profiles and Authentication Policies, and assign these configurations.

   See "Managing Global AuthMinder Configurations" for more information.

9. Enroll users with AuthMinder.

   See "Creating Users" for more information.

10. If required, configure the SAML token settings, RADIUS clients, and ASSP settings.

    See "Updating Organization Information" for more information.

11. If required, configure SSL-based communication between AuthMinder Server and its clients.

    See "Creating Trust Stores" for more information.

12. If required, configure the miscellaneous settings (such as token validity and challenge validity settings.)

    See "Configuring Miscellaneous Settings" for more information.

13. If you are planning to extend the AuthMinder functionality by the use of plug-ins, then register and configure these.

Note: See "Registering and Updating Plug-Ins" for more information on how to register a plug-in, "Configuring Plug-Ins" on how to configure a plug-in.

With this your system is set for administration. You can now manage the system ("Managing AuthMinder Server Instances"), administrators ("Managing Administrators"), and users ("Managing Users and Their Credentials").