geoff wrote:
For a few weeks I've been thinking about how to sell the Yubikey to an enterprise (specifically the one I work for). One challenge I see is the lack of a "enterprise grade" authentication server. What I mean by that is redundant systems so that if a auth server were to crash, or a facility where one is housed were to become unavailable, there would still be one or more backup authentication server available. Further, if anything were to go wrong with the server, there is an expectation that we have a support contract with the vendor.
I think that's more of an deployment & operational issue. I've been thinking about adopting the Nagios monitoring framework for Yubico's validation server, beside putting a load balancer to front the traffic from the net when the traffic grows.
geoff wrote:
So that leads to this question: would it be easier to modify the Yubico validation server to support multiple servers, replicated back end data, load balancing and to provide support contracts, or to release a new Yubikey OATH model that can use an existing "enterprise" OATH server? While the OATH authentication server market doesn't appear to be crowed, I think I've found one or two that attempt to meet those requirements.
Good ideas! Add them into the todo list of Yubico's open-sourced Java and PHP validation servers:
http://code.google.com/p/yubikey-val-server-php/http://code.google.com/p/yubikey-server-j/