What are the benefits and challenges of federating ArcGIS Server with Portal for ArcGIS?

1 What is federating?

Federating is the process of linking your ArcGIS Server site with your Portal for ArcGIS site, so that they share the same identity store, security settings, and portal content. When you federate a server, you delegate its security and user management to the portal, and you enable the server to participate in portal-based workflows, such as creating and consuming web maps and layers. Federating also simplifies the administration of your enterprise GIS, as you can manage your servers from the portal.

2 Benefits of federating

Federating your servers with your portal can enhance security by utilizing identity providers to authenticate and authorize users and groups, as well as applying access control to GIS resources. It can also improve collaboration by allowing users to share GIS data and services as portal items. Furthermore, federating your servers can increase functionality by enabling the publishing of hosted feature layers, tile layers, and scene layers, as well as running geoprocessing, geocoding, routing, and spatial analysis services. Moreover, it can provide access to advanced capabilities such as raster analysis, geoanalytics, and geoevent processing.

3 Challenges of federating

Federating your servers with your portal can involve some challenges, such as migration effort and performance impact. If you have existing ArcGIS Server sites that are not federated, you may have to migrate users, groups, roles, permissions, and services to the portal. This could be a lengthy process depending on the size and complexity of your enterprise GIS. You may also need to update custom applications and scripts to work with the portal's REST API and web services. Performance can be affected by network bandwidth, load balancing, and hardware resources. Therefore, you should monitor and optimize system performance, as well as scale up or out servers as needed. There are also configuration limitations that come with federating servers with the portal. For example, web-tier authentication, token-based authentication, or anonymous access cannot be enabled on federated servers. Additionally, servers in different domains or using different protocols than the portal cannot be federated.

4 How to federate

To federate your ArcGIS Server site with your Portal for ArcGIS site, you must first register your server with your portal as a portal item, using the portal's administrator account. Then, you can choose to make your server either a hosting server or a federated server depending on your needs and preferences. After that, you can configure the server's role, function, and properties, as well as its security settings such as SSL, HTTPS, and HSTS. Additionally, you can enable or disable specific functions and properties of your server like editing, sync, extract, kml, wms, wfs, or wcs. Lastly, you need to configure the server's trust settings, certificates, and CORS settings.

5 Best practices for federating

To ensure a successful and secure federation of your servers with your portal, you should plan your federation strategy before federating. Consider your business requirements, security policies, data sources, service types, user roles, and workflows to design an architecture that meets your needs and goals. Use a dedicated ArcGIS Server site as your hosting server and HTTPS for all communication between portal and server, as well as portal and clients. Additionally, keep your portal and servers updated with the latest patches and versions, as well as identity providers, web servers, databases, and operating systems updated with the latest security updates. This will help you avoid potential vulnerabilities and compatibility issues.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?