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The objective of providing an Active Directory Federation Service is to drastically simplify access management within the organization. ADFS supports identity management and provides a Single Sign-On solution, this is how;
• When a third-party, say your company’s clients, partners or vendors need an access to your environment, ADFS authenticates their username and passwords that allows the sharing of identities between the organizations securely, this is also known as “Federated Identity Management” as Federation means trust between your company and the third parties.
• ADFS offers Single Sign-On, where the users can sign on to multiple applications, without having to validate their credentials each time they log in. Users need only one strong, secure credential to log in to their applications.
ADFS for your organization – a good choice?
Deploying an Active Directory Federation Service should be a well-thought decision and shouldn’t be opted for just because businesses around you are going for it.
You may be able to make an informed decision after reading the advantages and disadvantages of ADFS as given below –
Single Sign-On to applications
The Single Sign-On solution is a real time-saver and enhances productivity. Employees have access to multiple applications and with SSO, they can login to all their applications at one go with only one set of credentials. They no longer need to spend time logging into each application. This saves a lot of their time and helps them become more productive.
Secure third-party connections
When a client or a vendor needs access to your environment, you cannot deny them the same. However, the question of how secure the access is, would surely bother you.
ADFS authenticates a user’s identity and helps establish a federation trust which builds secure third-party connections and makes sharing information between your organization and trusted partners much easier and secure.
Easy access to cloud apps
Accessing the applications on your Active Directory is undoubtedly a lot simpler. All the applications are in one place and you need only one credential to access them all. However, accessing cloud applications becomes complicated as they need different credentials which are in no relation to your AD credentials. So, if you use 5 cloud applications, you will be using and validating 10 different credentials.
This whole process is simplified with ADFS in Azure AD. You can easily access, manage and single sign-on to your cloud applications by authenticating the on-premise credentials.
ADFS also has some drawbacks – it is complex to understand, you cannot use ADFS on remote desktop servers, it may not be able to authenticate older apps, and the pricing is not necessarily pocket-friendly. In only 30 minutes we can demo why our SAAS software is now a leading choice for identity governance
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