5 Benefits Of Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS)

ADFS provides an identity federation solution for enterprises looking to share information with partners securely. Using the trust policy for a billboard Federation Service, you'll manage your trust relationship with partners, and map partner claims to claims understood by your organization’s web applications.

By counting on partner claims to initiate web application sessions, the responsibility for partner account management is retained by the partner. The partner exactly knows when employees are hired or terminated, and shift roles internally. 

ADFS also helps organizations share identity with partnerships using an equivalent trust policy. When establishing a partnership to use another organization’s web applications, ADFS provides a central place to manage and audit the worker identity information that's shared thereupon partner.

Identity federation with ADFS offers solutions to variety of potential issues. Therefore, it's vital to understand the 5 must-know benefits of ADFS, which are:

1. Secure Account Provisioning

Let’s look at an example. A partner organization has just hired a replacement employee and would really like that employee to access web applications offered by your organization under the prevailing partnership agreement. Instead of requiring a replacement account managed by your organization, ADFS enables your organization to simply accept digitally signed claims from the partner organization. These claims from the partner organization can confirm that the requestor is indeed an employee of the partner.

2. Hassle-free Account Credential Management 

With a replacement local account for the partner employee, you’d normally got to have some method of managing the credential they use, to authenticate. With ADFS, your organization not must revoke, change, or reset that credential, since the credential is managed by the partner organization.

3. Easy Account Management

Consider a scenario where an employee during a partner organization features a new role that needs access to a special set of your web apps. With ADFS, your partner always sends claims that reflect the employee’s current roles and permissions. Since ADFS allows you to use the partner’s claims to regulate access to your applications, the employee’s access is updated immediately.

4. Simplified Account Deactivation

With  Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), the employer can remove access for this employee across all other partner organizations. Without this functionality, the employer would need to contact each partner organization separately—and the ex-employee would still have access until this was accomplished. A big security threat averted.

5. Effective Change Management

Imagine that a partner organization has started joining hands together with your top rival. Your organization decides to finish the partnership to avoid any longer information disclosure. With ADFS, the termination of the partnership are often effected with just one trust about-face . Without centralized partner management, individual accounts for every partner employee would wish to be deactivated—a much lengthier and cumbersome process to execute.ADFS enabled identity federation allows enterprises to share identities in an interoperable, standardized way while reducing the headaches involved in business-to-business partnering. In addition, the claims-based identity model supported by ADFS and therefore the WS-* specifications represents an integral a part of the Microsoft identity platform. The online documentation makes it easy for you to experiment with the technology and see how it can help to alleviate your identity management challenges.

Celestix Federated Virtual Appliance Could be a  simplified, and secure solution that permits implementing Active Directory Federation Services ADFS seamlessly, for Single Sign-on (SSO) to Office 365, and various other SaaS applications within the cloud and behind the firewall. It is available within the sort of a virtual installer – VA Series.