Patent ID: 9363270
Filing Date: 2016-06-07
CPC Classification: G06F,H04L

Claim Text:
1. A method for managing administrative access to a computing platform having a plurality of tiered computing components, including a plurality of compute devices, a plurality of network devices, and a virtualization environment, the method comprising: determining a group of platform administrators comprised of users authorized to configure a plurality of personas; determining a group of platform users comprised of users authorized to perform administrative tasks on the tiered computing components without knowledge of any administrative credentials for the tiered computing components; generating, at a server, the plurality of personas, wherein each persona defines a set of administrative tasks that a user associated with the persona is permitted to execute on one or more of the plurality of compute devices, the plurality of network devices, and the virtualization environment, and wherein the persona comprises a federated identity for a group of users having a time-limited administrative privileges on one or more of the plurality of compute devices, the plurality of network devices, and the virtualization environment; and registering, at the server, administrative credentials used to authorize executing administrative commands on each of the plurality of compute devices, the plurality of network devices, and the virtualization environment by: based on the mapping, allow the first user to execute the set of administrative tasks defined by the first persona without knowledge of the registered administrative credentials, wherein the set of administrative tasks are executed on one or more of the plurality of computing devices, the plurality of network devices, and the virtualization environment.