10 May 2016, 11:32
With Privacy by Design, integrated Gluu access management and comprehensive support for regulatory data compliance, Qvarn is set to become the Europe-wide platform of choice for managing workforce identities and providing associated value-added services.
Construction industry federations in Sweden, Finland and the Baltic States have been using the Qvarn Platform since October 2015 to securely manage the professional digital identities of close to one million construction workers. Developed on behalf of these same federations, Qvarn is now free and open source software; making it a compelling solution for any organization that needs to manage a secure register of workers’ data.
“There is something universal and fundamental at the core of the Qvarn platform. And that’s trust,” said Qvarn evangelist Kaius Häggblom. “We decided to make it free, open source and include Gluu access management because we wanted all those using Qvarn or contributing to its continued development to have the freedom to work with the platform in whatever way is best for them.”
Qvarn has been designed to meet the requirements of the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), enabling organizations that use the platform to ensure their compliance with the new law. Qvarn has also incorporated the principles of Privacy by Design to minimize the disclosure of non-essential personal information and to give people more control over their data.
“Today, Qvarn is used by the construction industry as a way to manage the data of employees, many of whom frequently move across borders. In this way the platform helps to combat the grey economy in the building sector, thereby improving quality and safety, while simultaneously protecting the professional identity data of almost a million individuals,” said Häggblom. “Qvarn is so flexible and secure that we envision it becoming the preferred platform for the provision of any value-added services with an identity management component, eventually even supporting monetary transactions.”
Qvarn is a cloud based solution supported to run on both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and OpenStack. In partnership with Gluu, the platform delivers an out-of-the-box solution that uses open and standard protocols to provide powerful yet flexible identity and access management, including mechanisms for appropriate authentication and authorization.
“Qvarn's identity management and governance capabilities perfectly compliment the Gluu Server's access management features,” said Founder and CEO of Gluu, Michael Schwartz. “Free open source software (FOSS) is essential to the future of identity and access management. And the FOSS development methodology provides the transparency that is needed to foster the strong sense of community upon which a vibrant ecosystem thrives.”
Qvarn’s development team continues to be led by recognized open source developer and platform architect Lars Wirzenius. He has been developing free and open source software for 30 years and is a renowned expert in the Linux environment, with a particular focus on the Debian distribution. Lars works at all levels of software development – from writing code to designing system architecture.