- [Instructor] Many organizations are turning to
Cloud based services to meet a variety
of their computing needs.
Identity and Access Management is an emerging area
where enterprises are gaining significant benefits
by using third party providers.
Identity as a Service, or IDaaS Providers,
allow organizations to move some or all of their
Identity and Access Management infrastructure to the Cloud,
eliminating the need for employing costly and hard-to-find
Identity and Management Access specialists.
Identity as a Service began by offering simple,
single sign-on services for web-based softwares
or service products used by an organization.
These services integrate with two different types
of platforms to help organizations improve their
Identity and Access Management infrastructure.
First, they integrate with an organization's
existing directory service to obtain the details
of what users exist in an organization
and those users' identity attributes.
This information is synchronized in real time,
allowing organizations to quickly provision
and deprovision users by following
their normal business practices.
This integration can be with a traditional,
on-premises directory service, such as
Active Directory, or LDAP, or may use a
Cloud based directory service,
such as Google's G Suite.
Second, Identity as a Service providers integrate
with a wide variety of Software as a Service vendors.
This integration allows them to takeover the
authentication process for those systems.
Users won't need to manage different accounts
for each of those services, and the organization
won't need to invest time and energy in building
and maintaining an authentication integration
between their own directory service and the Cloud provider.
The Identity as a Service provider manages all of this,
on behalf of the organization.
For example, here's a list of just some of the
Cloud services supported by OneLogin,
one of the providers in this field.
Organizations that use any of these services
can quickly and simply enable the use of
OneLogin service to authenticate to all of these
Cloud Service Providers, without writing
any authentication code.
Other providers have similarly long lists.
These providers also offer multifactor
authentication solutions that allow enterprises
to quickly adopt a second authentication factor
across all of their applications without modifying
their own authentication systems.
Identity as a Service providers are also moving beyond
Cloud based systems and now offer integrations
with on-premises legacy applications as well.
Organizations considering an Identity as a Service
approach should first verify that the products
under consideration meet their business requirements
for identity management, such as supporting
all the services used by the organization.
They should also conduct careful security reviews
to satisfy themselves that the provider will handle
sensitive authentication and identity management tasks
in a secure manner.