Universal Connector and Targets

The Universal Connector establishes and maintains the integration between a system in the organization’s infrastructure and the ObserveID platform. It is installed and running on the customer’s premises and acts as middleware, via which the communication is maintained with the provisionally connected systems.

In most cases, except specific implementations, the Universal Connector is stateless. Being requested from the customer’s systems, also referred to as Targets, raw data transits directly to ObserveID.

How does communication work?

The communication and data exchange between the systems is implemented to help identity management, strengthen security, and build an overarching picture of the access context across systems in the corporate infrastructure, which often tends to be diverse and multi-cloud.

The Universal Connector is a service operating on a Windows machine. Over the corporate network, it communicates with the organization’s systems on behalf of ObserveID. The connection to each specific Target is established individually and determined by the Integration Type. Before the connection is initialized, it requires some pre-requisite work on both sides (i.e., the ObserveID platform side and a specific Target side). With a successful connection established for every system and the Universal Connector, the data appears and is displayed for the end-user to manage it in ObserveID.

Connection to ObserveID

The Universal Connector stores no logic, and all calls it performs to the Targets are requested by the ObserveID platform. With ObserveID, it communicates via API over a secure private channel. For encryption, and other security measures in use, reach out to the engineering team at ObserveID Inc.

The ObserveID platform is built from several components, each pursuing its own goals. The part responsible for managing the communication with the Universal Connector is called “Access360”. A collection of explicitly defined operations fully controls what the Universal Connector fetches data from/to the Targets. The set of all integration-specific functions, known as the “Universal Connector API,” makes up the engine that instructs the UC what to do, validates incoming data against a predefined set of rules, and provides it to the Angular frontend for a display to the end-user.

What to expect next in the document?

The Connector Documentation is focused on helping to set up the Universal Connector and its communication with Targets, configuring rules, and getting ready to import and work with the Integration data.