Identity as a Service

To execute various duties, employees at a company must enter into the system. These systems can run on a local server or in the cloud. The following are some of the issues that an employee may face:

For accessing various servers, remembering different username and password combinations.

When an employee quits the organisation, it is necessary to disable all of that user's accounts. This adds to the workload of IT personnel.

Identity-as-a-Service (IaaS) is a novel technology that was developed to address the aforementioned issues (IDaaS).

IDaaS allows you to manage your identification data as a digital entity. During electronic transactions, this identity can be used.

Identity

A combination of traits connected with anything that makes it recognised is referred to as its identity. Even if all objects have the same qualities, they cannot have the same identities. A unique identifier property is used to assign a unique identity.

Several identification services are used to validate services such as web sites, transactions, transaction participants, and clients, among others. The following are examples of Identity-as-a-Service: 

Services that provide directories
Services that are federated
Services for registration and authentication
Monitoring of risks and events
Services with a single sign-on
Management of identities and profiles
Using a single sign-on (SSO)

Companies increasingly use Single Sign-On software to overcome the problem of using separate username and password combinations for different servers, allowing users to log in once and manage access to many systems.

As indicated in the diagram, SSO has a single authentication server that manages numerous accesses to other systems:

Working of the SSO

SSO is implemented in a variety of ways. We'll go over the most popular ones here:

  • A username and password are used to log onto the authentication server.
  • The user's ticket is returned by the authentication server.
  • The ticket is sent to the intranet server by the user.
  • The ticket is sent from the intranet server to the authentication server.
  • The authentication server returns to the intranet server the user's security credentials for that server.
  • If an employee quits the organisation, the authentication server disables the user's account, preventing access to all systems.
  • Identity Management That Is Federated (FIDM)
  • The tools and protocols that allow a user to package security credentials across security domains are referred to as FIDM. It packages a user's security credentials using Security Markup Language (SAML), as seen in the picture below:
  • OpenID
  • It allows users to utilise a single account to log into different websites. OpenID is supported by Google, Yahoo!, Flickr, MySpace, and WordPress.com, to name a few.

Benefits

  • Conversation rates on the site have increased.
  • User profile content is more accessible, and there are fewer issues with forgotten passwords.
  • Content integration into social networking sites is simple.