System for Cross-domain Identity Management

System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) is an open standard for automating the exchange of user identity information between identity domains, or IT systems.

For example, as a company hires and fires employees, they are added and removed from the company's electronic employee directory. SCIM could be used to automatically add/delete (or, provision/de-provision) accounts for those users in external systems such as Google Apps for Work, Office 365, or Salesforce.com. Then, a new user account would exist in the external systems for each new employee, and the user accounts for former employees might no longer exist in those systems.

In addition to simple user-record management (creating & deleting), SCIM can also be used to share information about user attributes, attribute schema, and group membership. Attributes could range from user contact information to group membership. Group membership or other attribute values are generally used to manage user permissions. Attribute values and group assignments can change, adding to the challenge of maintaining the relevant data across multiple identity domains.

The SCIM standard has grown in popularity and importance, as organizations use more SaaS tools. A large organization can have hundreds or thousands of hosted applications (internal and external) and related servers, databases and file shares that require user provisioning. Without a standard connection method, companies must write custom software connectors to join these systems and their IdM system.

SCIM uses a standardised API through REST with data formatted in JSON or XML.

The first version, SCIM 1.0, was released in 2011 by a SCIM standard working group organized under the Open Web Foundation. In 2011, it was transferred to the IETF, and the current standard, SCIM 2.0 was released as IETF RFC in 2015.

SCIM 2.0 was completed in September 2015 and is published as IETF RFCs 7643 and 7644. A use-case document is also available as RFC7642.

The standard has been implemented in various IdM software.

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