Planning your cloud subscription

Use the considerations listed to help you plan for your IBM® Cloud Pak for Business Automation as a Service subscription.

Cloud environments

The number of environments on your tenant depends on the subscription type:
  • Express: Covers the entire lifecycle of a decision service in one environment.
  • Enterprise: Provides three environments: development, test, and production.
Some capabilities might have variations in the numbers of environments.

Additional environments are available upon request. When you plan your cloud subscription, consider whether, for example, to include a staging environment or a dedicated environment for a department or line of business.

User authentication

Cloud Pak for Business Automation as a Service supports both identity provider (IdP) initiated mode and service provider initiated mode for Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) single sign-on. Single sign-on is the ability to leverage a single user identity (user email and password) to access multiple systems. SAML enables Cloud Pak for Business Automation as a Service to delegate user authentication to your company's authentication process so that you can leverage your company's user identity provider or user email to access your subscription using SAML. The user has an account on the cloud subscription but logs in to the subscription through your company IdP. For more information, see Password management.

Your cloud subscription must be explicitly set up for SAML authentication, typically when your account is initially created. If you have an existing account and require SAML authentication, contact IBM Support.

Clock synchronization

ISO 27001 requires that clocks of all relevant information processing systems within an organization or security domain must be synchronized with a single reference time source.

Cloud Pak for Business Automation as a Service uses time.service.networklayer.com to synchronize its system clocks. To comply with ISO 27001 requirements, you should also use time.service.networklayer.com to synchronize the clocks on your client systems with Cloud Pak for Business Automation as a Service.