Software are like magic props of the corporate world.
They automate a process to give you the outcome for which you traded countless hours and efforts. It’s like magic that makes you go, “Aha!”. The more “Aha” moments you get, the higher you feel encouraged to use the software.
The encouragement is so great that you innocently skip IT’s approval and purchase it on your credit card. Although this speeds up the expected outcome, it increases shadow IT and its associated risks.
The trade-off between productivity and security increases as you grow bigger. This creates multiple user identities, credentials, and accounts across several solutions on the cloud or on-premises.
An Identity as a Service solution makes managing these identities and their transitions in work tenure easier. It’s an identity and access management (IAM) solution provided by a third-party vendor through the cloud.
Let’s take a deep dive into Identity as a Service and go through its fundamentals for more clarity.
Identity as a Service lets users streamline identity management tasks online through the cloud. It’s a cloud-based identity solution run by a third-party vendor.
The X-as-a-Service model is simple. It's a third-party vendor that offers a feature or service through the cloud. You don’t have to manage it in-house or allocate resources. When identity services are delivered through the cloud, it’s called IDaaS.
IDaaS takes care of user authentication and verification of access permissions when users try to access different company assets, such as software, information, or files. Access privileges are often configured based on users’ roles in the company.
Server role groups with the right access privileges are created through the IDaaS solution. When a user’s role changes, you simply move them to a different group to modify their access privileges. This is role-based access control (RBAC). It’s a popular way to manage user identities through IDaaS solutions.
The first identity and access management solution appeared as enterprise software, like Microsoft Active Directory, launched with Microsoft Windows 2000. Actually, digital identity management started to become an essential part of security for many companies in the late 1990s. Since it came with a high price tag and substantial setup costs, small organizations were steered away from adopting it.
This created an opportunity for third-party software that could be managed remotely. Like Salesforce’s CRM, these SaaS solutions empowered small organizations to adopt enterprise software without spending extensively on it. This was the state of SaaS in the early 2000s. Since the software was based on the cloud, it became easier to integrate with various software apps in different environments.
In the same vein as SaaS, IAM vendors started offering cloud-based IDaaS. This made identity and access management affordable for businesses of all sizes, giving smaller businesses equal opportunities to balance user experience and security.
The statistics below show how the IDaaS market has grown in the past five years.
Caption: Marketing size of Identity as a Service (IDaaS) worldwide ( 2019 - 2030) in billion U.S. dollars.
Source: Statista
IDaaS is a subcategory of identity and access management (IAM). It’s all about making web applications easier to use by extending user identities with single sign-on (SSO). This helps users work with a variety of different credentials for different applications.
In the past, IDaaS solutions worked on top of traditional identity providers like Active Directory to work with web apps. This empowered organizations to keep using their old systems before they completely transitioned to cloud applications. Modern IDaaS solutions allow users to connect to their applications regardless of what devices they’re using or what location they’re working from.
On the other hand, identity and access management (IAM) tracks all user identities and access to an organization’s assets. In addition to managing directory extensions and web apps, it facilitates single sign-on and privileged access management, which manages access to high-security accounts.
Modern IAM has become more complex. In the past, it was on-premises and revolved around Microsoft Windows via Active Directory. Enforcing IAM policies on old-school on-premises solutions was rather tricky. Modern IAM was born from deploying cloud-based solutions to either improve or replace the old ways of managing user identities.
Identity as a Service provides identity and access management features to facilitate secure access to an organization’s assets. Some solutions are packaged to focus on a single aspect, like directories. Others offer single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and directory capabilities. Different types of users, such as customers, employees, or other business partners, can benefit from these solutions.
The basic IDaaS comes with SSO for small and mid-sized companies. These organizations normally have several SaaS applications and don’t have extensive on-premises IT infrastructure.
On the other hand, enterprise IDaaS supports different kinds of enterprise environments, such as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and other SaaS applications. IDaaS solutions typically complement existing IAM systems in big corporate environments.
Enterprise IDaaS comes with granular access controls that meet identity and access management needs in the corporate environment.
IDass delivers identity services through application programming interfaces (APIs). APIs allow programs to communicate data and functions safely and quickly, empowering developers to build applications faster using existing data and functionality.
Whenever a user requests access across a company’s IT infrastructure, an API delivers a consistent login page everywhere. The credentials entered by the user on this page are shipped to the identity provider (IdP) to authenticate the request. To verify a user's identity and determine if they can access a service, the IDaaS system consults a user directory with access controls and permission information.
After identifying a user, the API sends a security token to the application that specifies which parts of the application the user can access. The user gets access to the application. The IDaaS vendor tracks every interaction a user has with the API. It delivers comprehensive logs for reporting, auditing, and metrics through a dashboard within the IDaaS platform.
The features of IDaaS vendors differ based on use cases. Here are some of the common features you’ll find in organizations:
In multi-factor authentication, the user must present two or more pieces of evidence to gain access. After proving the user identity in these checks, access is granted. Typically, one step of verification requires a user to present what they know, the second step requires them to show something they possess, and other steps can be based on what they inherit.
Source: OneLogin
Here are examples of verification proofs for:
Other checks can be performed in addition to these authentication methods. For example, the decision to give or withdraw access permission is made based on the location of a user’s IP address.
Adaptive or risk-based authentication analyzes additional factors like context and behavior while verifying authentication requests. For example, is the connection on a private or a public network? Or is the device used to authenticate the same as yesterday?
These questions help determine the risk level based on which users are authenticated into the system.
Here’s an example that illustrates how risk-based authentication works:
Passwordless authentication lets users access resources without passwords but by providing their identity through different means. These means include:
A single sign-on (SSO) is based on the trust relationship between a service provider (application) and an identity provider. The identity provider sends the service provider a certificate verifying the user's identity. In this process, the identity data is shared as tokens containing identifying information like username or email address.
Here’s what the process looks like:
When a user tries to access a different application, the trust relationship is similar, and the authentication process will pass the same test.
The identity proofing process verifies a user's identity and ensures they’re who they claim to be. It happens before a user works with regular authentication or gets access credentials.
There are two parts of identity proofing, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), including:
Identity proofing’s primary purpose is to match the claimed identity with the actual identity.
In IT, orchestration links different tools to automate tasks. For identity management, identity orchestration connects various identity tools, like login systems, to create smooth user workflows, such as logging in or setting up accounts.
Because identity tools don't always work together smoothly, identity orchestration creates a central hub that manages all identity tools in one place (called an identity fabric).
It coordinates authentication and access between apps so users can move between tools without logging in separately. This setup simplifies processes and improves security, letting companies manage user access efficiently across all tools.
An API security solution protects APIs from attacks that could steal sensitive information or disrupt services. Since APIs work behind the scenes to enable communication between systems, keeping them protected is critical to ensuring data security. IDaaS solutions have API security features to safeguard the data flow while verifying identities.
Below are some common threats that challenge API security. Review them to be aware of such malicious activities in your organization.
IDaaS empowers organizations to handle authentication and user access while efficiently reducing security risks. In addition to improving user convenience, it keeps security and access controls in place, safeguarding the organization’s security posture.
IDaaS offers a scalable solution for managing an expanding network of users, devices, and applications as digital transformation matures in organizations. It gives users the productivity they need at the pace they expect without compromising on data security or cybersecurity.
Learn more about identity and access management and see how IDaaS contributes to the larger and more extensive IAM policy.
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