Looking into the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism’s efficient replacement for a single sign-on feature

The existing process for sign-on needed updating as it was deemed outdated and expensive.

In its mission to improve its processes, the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism (DCT) identified that the technology, structure, and supportability to deliver a cohesive integration layer within the Microsoft Azure platform for the single sign-on process was outdated and expensive.

DCT management delivered a strategy to lead the implementation and migration from the existing platform to the Microsoft Azure B2C delivery platform in a better way.

Amongst the issues it has encountered is creating apps that each maintain its own username and password information incurs a high administrative burden when adding or removing users across multiple apps. Instead, apps can delegate that responsibility to a centralised identity provider.

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is a centralised identity provider in the cloud. Delegating authentication and authorisation to it enables scenarios such as conditional access policies that require a user to be in a specific location; the use of multi-factor authentication, which is sometimes called two-factor authentication or 2FA, and; enabling a user to sign in once and then be automatically signed in to all of the web apps that share the same centralised directory. 

The identity platform simplifies authorisation and authentication for application developers by providing identity as a service. It supports industry-standard protocols and open-source libraries for different platforms to help users start coding quickly. It allows developers to build applications that sign in all Microsoft identities, get tokens to call Microsoft Graph, access Microsoft application programming interface (APIs), or access other APIs that developers have built.

It is estimated that DCT will be able to lower the cost of platform management by up to 70% YoY.

An adjunct to this program was the onboarding process for new application platforms that have been defined and proven as successful across all of the current application deliveries. The basics of a good architecture are to layer the application into multiple autocratic and autonomous applications that can be replaced individually and allow the government body to keep the application running whilst working on a specific layer.

This program was initiated in March 2022 and was marked as successful in delivering all services in July 2022.

The DCT’s innovation has been recognised by the Middle East Technology Excellence Awards as the company clinches the win in the Cloud - Government Organisation category. The prestigious awards programme honours outstanding companies in the region that made exceptional contributions in pursuit of technological innovation in their respective industries.  

The Middle East Technology Excellence Awards is presented by Asian Business Review Magazine. To view the full list of winners, click here. If you want to join the 2023 awards programme and be acclaimed for your company's outstanding contributions in pursuit of technological innovation, please contact Julie Anne Nuñez at [email protected].