Dinesh on Java

Suppose one IT Company have thousands of Employees and that IT company share resources of multiple tasks with different login ID and password. In my office Times have different portal like TJ, MB, IndiaTimes, TOI, SM etc. these portal have login functionality for all users so its very difficult to manage all login IDs for each portal.

To solve above problems, a new technique emerged which is known as Identity as a Service (IDaaS). Identity as a Service (IDaaS) is an authentication infrastructure that is built, hosted and managed by a third-party service provider. IDaaS can be thought of as single sign-on (SSO) for the cloud.

Single Sign-On (SSO)

To solve the problem of using different username & password combination for different servers, companies now employ Single Sign-On software, which allows the user to login only one time and manages the user’s access to other systems.

SSO has single authentication server, managing multiple accesses to other systems, as shown in the following diagram:

Working of SSO

Following steps explain the working of Single Sign-On software:
1. User logs into the authentication server using a username and password.
2. The authentication server returns the user’s token.
3. User sends the token to intranet server.
4. Intranet server sends the token to the authentication server.

Authentication server sends the user’s security credentials for that server back to the intranet server.

Benefits of IDaaS Cloud Computing layer

1. Increased site conversation rates.
2. Access to greater user profile content.
3. Fewer problems with lost passwords.
4. Ease of content integration into social networking sites.

Examples-

It offers users to login into multiple websites with single account. Google, Yahoo!, Flickr, MySpace, WordPress.com are some of the companies that support OpenID.