Cisco Cisco Transport Manager 9.2 Technical References

CTM is an advanced management system that provides functionality at the element and network 
management levels for Cisco optical network elements (NEs) and switches. CTM supports fault, 
configuration, performance, and security management functional areas. CTM also serves as a foundation 
for integration into a larger overall Operations Support System (OSS) environment by providing 
northbound gateway interfaces to higher-layer management systems.

The basic external authentication feature enables CTM to authenticate users who log in through the 
SiteMinder policy server, a third-party application from Computer Associates International, Inc., and the 
RADIUS access server.

Basic external authentication involves the following key components:

The following figure illustrates the basic external authentication workflow.

The SiteMinder policy server:

Provides an infrastructure for centralized and secure policy management that scales to meet the 
needs of large enterprise applications.

Provides a way to uniquely identify and authenticate users and track and manage their privileges.

1. Authentication request

4. Local

 profile

 validation

CTM

database

CTM

server

CTM

Access

server

CTM

client

CTM

client

5. Authentication result

2. External authentication request

3. External authentication result

5. Authentication 

result

1. Authentication 

request

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