What is Identity as a service IDaaS and How does it work?
Do you know about Identity as a service IDaaS? Identity as a service is an IT architecture in which identity and access management services are provided by a cloud-based application. This type of architecture provides many benefits to large organizations, such as scalability and reduced costs.
If you’re a business owner, then you know that it’s important to protect your data. You also know that if something is stolen from your company, such as customer information or proprietary documents, the damage could be irreparable. One way to do this is by using identity as a service IDaaS.
Table of Contents
What is Identity as a service?
IDaaS stands for Identity-As-A-Service. An Identity as a service IDaaS is an alternative to traditional authentication. This article will discuss how it works and what the benefits are for your business.
IDaaS (Identity as a Service) is becoming more and more popular among business owners and users. This can be attributed to the many benefits that come with it.
To begin with, the management of identities becomes easier when you use IDaaS, instead of managing users’ credentials individually.
Secondly, it provides users access to applications on the go without having to worry about physical tokens.
This post will discuss what IDaaS is and how it works in order to help you better understand this innovative technology and its benefits for businesses of all sizes.
How Does identity as a service IDaaS Works?
In a traditional authentication system, users would be required to create user accounts with passwords and access keys in order to log into the application. In an Identity as a service IDaaS system, however, users are authenticated through an external provider that manages these credentials for them. This means that end-users only have to remember one password or PIN number, which is their personal login code.
The user logs into the application and instantly is authenticated and granted access to all of their resources. For instance, if a user wanted to send an email from his or her Google Gmail account, he or she would log into the application and be granted access immediately. No additional credentials would be required beyond the user’s login code.
How does IDaaS benefit my organization?
Security is a major concern for businesses of all sizes, especially when it comes to protecting company data and intellectual property. In addition to the built-in security mechanisms inherent in today’s identity as a service IDaaS system, many providers offer advanced authentication methods such as advanced multi-factor authentication.
The cloud-based storage of IDaaS also benefits organizations by making it more efficient to store data and documents on a remote, secure platform. If your business currently stores company files in the cloud for this purpose, then using identity as a service will make it easier to share and collaborate with colleagues and partners.
Another benefit of IDaaS is that it can simplify company-wide authentication and access management. This means that instead of having to remember and manage numerous login credentials for various applications, employees only need to memorize one password or PIN number, which acts as a master key for all resources within the company.
In addition, IDaaS reduces the risk of cybercrime. With traditional authentication methods, end users are required to create and remember numerous different passwords and PIN numbers.
Advantage of IDaaS
Some of the benefits include:
- Single sign-on access to all cloud-based applications, regardless of device.
- Ability to allow for selective access based on time, location, and data permission.
- Authentication is performed by a trusted third party rather than an internal IT department or application developer.
- Automatic compliance with local data protection regulations.
- Minimizing User Error and Compliance Risk
1. Scale & Agility
Traditional IDM solutions are not designed for scale or agility, at least in the public cloud, so their implementation is an operationally invasive and costly undertaking requiring substantial financial investment as well as a commitment of staff with subject-area expertise including all life cycle management, configuration, integration, and run book.
IDaaS scales better, without requiring changes to the core software, and also provides agility for organizations that need to make changes quickly in response to business demands.
2. Workflow Automation
Cloud Identity provides a streamlined experience with intuitive workflows, “single sign-on”, “in-place” provisioning and de-provisioning, and automated security controls.
3. Business Agility
Cloud Identity enhances business agility through rapid entitlement management, policy automation, and dynamic provisioning to cloud resources (including Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service).
Automation includes user onboarding/offboarding workflow, entitlements provisioning, and security policy enforcement.
4. Elastic Capacity
Organizations can make real-time adjustments to their cloud adoption strategy without having to provision (or delay) for peak load times by dynamically scaling up or down the number of users being managed within a single tenant account. That business agility is combined with high scale to reduce your costs on cloud resources.
5. Improve Security
Identity as a service makes it easy for an organization to improve the security of its services by using multi-factor authentication, enforcing policies that require users to take specific actions before accessing data or performing certain tasks, and controlling who has access to what information is based on their role in the organization.
6. Vendor Independence
A cloud-based identity management service provides the security, scale and configuration independence that allows an organization to use multiple platforms or applications without having to duplicate its efforts for each one. Cloud Identity is protocol agnostic, so it can support any Service Oriented Architecture model including SAML2, OIDC open standards, OAuth open standards, OpenID Connect, WS-Federation, and FBA.
7. Cost Savings
A cloud identity solution provides significant cost savings for an organization by centralizing the management of multiple systems into a single interface that is much easier to manage. The need to purchase additional licensing costs for each platform or application is eliminated.
8. Seamless Integration
Cloud Identity provides a single sign-on experience that can flow across multiple platforms, devices, and environments. It simplifies the end-user experience by enabling them to use fewer passwords for greater access to more services on any device. Access to cloud applications is easy via the portal, mobile app, or management tools.
9. Improved Productivity
Cloud Identity enables employees to work anywhere, anytime with access to the information they need so they can be more productive and effective in their jobs. The automated process of provisioning user accounts also ensures that users are always up-to-date on compliance requirements, eliminating unnecessary or time-consuming help desk calls.
10. Compliance
All activity within a cloud identity service is documented and auditable which ensures compliance with internal policies as well as industry regulations such as SOX, HIPAA, and GDPR. The ability to quickly create policy templates automated for users’ access levels also enables the organization to routinely meet those compliance requirements.