OpenText Cloud Bridge provides several important benefits. For more information, see the following topics:
OpenText Cloud Bridge simplifies and secures communication between SaaS applications, such as OpenText™ Identity Governance or OpenText™ Advanced Authentication, and on-premises identity sources and applications, such as Microsoft® Active Directory™ or OpenText™ Identity Manager. The OpenText Cloud Bridge Agent communicates with the SaaS applications through a secure messaging service outside the corporate firewall. This messaging service is adaptable for various workloads and provides guaranteed delivery of messages. No VPN is needed and all OpenText Cloud Bridge Agent connections are outbound connections to a well-defined port. Data is protected both in transit and at rest.
In a common scenario, you might have both on-premises and SaaS products interacting with OpenText Cloud Bridge. For example, you have both on-premises OpenText Identity Manager and SaaS licenses for OpenText Advanced Authentication and OpenText Identity Governance. Your employees need to log in to their SaaS accounts as well as their on-premises applications. Your employees are authenticated through the OpenText Advanced Authentication SaaS service, which communicates with on-premises identity sources through an OpenText Cloud Bridge messaging layer.
After your OpenText Cloud Bridge Agent is installed and running in your on-premises environment, it begins sending heartbeat messages. The OpenText SaaS operations team sets up the necessary data protection features and monitors the health of your installed Agent.
The credential management feature in the OpenText Cloud Bridge Agent ensures that the credentials for a target data source never leave your network. The Agent associates the credentials with the service configuration on demand.
High availability capabilities in OpenText Cloud Bridge also help you meet your organizational goals for operational performance. After you configure your environment to specify your preferred OpenText™ Cloud Bridge Agent sites and instances, when a planned or unplanned shutdown takes place, failover to the specified Agent site and instance occurs automatically and with minimal service interruption. As part of the failover process, the OpenText Cloud Bridge Client loads active service configurations previously used by the primary Agent instance into a new target Agent instance, enabling consuming applications to quickly resume their collection, provisioning, and other activities.
The high availability architecture means that more instances of the Agent simply require you to run additional Agent containers without any orchestration software or databases needed. You can set up as many failover instances as your organization requires, and all Agent instances can be in an active state concurrently. Not only do Agent administrators have the ability to view each Agent’s instance configuration and the current target Agent instance, but the SaaS operations team also monitors your Agent instances. For more information about planning for high availability, see Planning for High Availability.