Modern days Identity management for your next project

Custom Build vs Paid Identity Management Services

What is Identity Management?

Identity management, refers to a service or platform that identifies individuals and controls their access to system resources through user rights and restrictions.Identity management is important for security and increases the productivity of users by implementing a central directory: users don’t need to remember and keep track of several different usernames and passwords.

According to Wikipedia Identity management, also known as identity and access management, is a framework of policies and technologies for ensuring that the proper people in an enterprise have the appropriate access to technology resources. IdM systems fall under the overarching umbrella of IT security and Data Management.

Use cases

Identity management solutions provide benefits for all types of businesses. IAM can also provide distinct and specialized features to serve B2B, B2C, and B2E use cases.

B2B : A business provides federated identity management to another business, such as Trello allowing another business to log into Trello with their enterprise credentials.

B2C : A business provides social authentication to consumers through Facebook, Google, or other social media identity providers.

B2E : A business provides single sign-on to its own employees.

Different types of identity management solution

Federated Identity : Federated Identity Management is a method of transferring authentication data without violating the same origin policy, generally by using an external authorization server.

Single Sign On (SSO): SSO is a type of Federated Identity Management. SSO occurs when a user logs into one client and is then signed in to other clients automatically, regardless of differences in platform, technology, or domain. A token or cookie is generated to authenticate the user across domains.

Enterprise Federation : Enterprise Federation is Federated Identity Management with enterprise connections such as Active Directory, LDAP, ADFS, SAML, Google Apps, etc.

Signs You Need to Move From Custom Build to an Identity Management Solution

1. You need a standards-based solution, such as OpenID Connect, SAML, WS-Federation, and/or OAuth
2. You have users that authenticate with various identity providers but lack a way to link their accounts.
3. You have applications on different domains and require users to log in separately for each.
4. Your best developers spend their time building and maintaining identity management and authentication instead of building core business applications.
5. Your company has experienced any type of data breach or you are concerned with a data breach.

Here Specifically I will talk about B2C(Business to Customers) Identity Management Use Cases.

Why we want a 3rd Party identity management Solution for B2C Products specially for Startups,Small to medium business

1. Your main source of user data comes from directly asking users on forms or surveys. Being able to easily extract third party data about your users would help you better understand your customers and drive more revenue through upsells and targeted marketing.
2. If you sell to consumers, you don’t offer an easy 1-click signup option through social identity providers.
3. You’ve faced performance concerns as you increased your user base.
4. Last but not the least as developer i faced this issue of managing own identity management solution really really slow down your core business and product development and also increase the security threats.

List of popular 3rd party identity management solution

1. Auth0[https://auth0.com/]
2. Okta[https://www.okta.com/]

I’m not going to compare which is better both are good and I have used both , you can try this freely for your upcoming projects

Others Identity Management Solution are

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