What’s an Identity Provider (IdP)?

You could have the strongest firewalls, encryption, anti-malware, vulnerability scanners, and risk management tools in the world and still leave one critical gap in your cybersecurity infrastructure — insider threats.

And most of those threats come from poor identity management.

But what, exactly, is good identity management? How do you pick the right identity provider for your organization?

In this post, we’ll review what identity providers are, their crucial role in every IT department’s protocol, and how to achieve comprehensive wrap-around security and compliance.

What Is an Identity?

In IT terms, a digital identity represents a user; more importantly, it represents what systems, applications, files, and servers that user has access to and the level of access they have. As you can imagine, an employee on the marketing team will have a very different set of permissions than someone on the engineering team, who will have a very different set of permissions than someone working in HR.

Setting and updating these identities over time is critical. Companies swap applications in and out. Employees come and go. And new compliance regulations impact who gets access to what and when. Accurate and organized identity management is key to keeping an organization’s data safe and secure throughout these changes.

What Is an Identity Provider?

The identity and access control systems within an organization span a number of different resources — but it all starts with the directory service, often referred to as the “identity provider.”

An identity provider, otherwise known as an IdP, stores and manages the identities employees (and systems) use to log in to their devices, applications, files, servers, and any other software or hardware they need to do their jobs.

Think of it as the brain of any identity and user management infrastructure. It houses hundreds to thousands of user records. And those user records contain credentials. Whenever users try to access an IT resource, that resource will double-check with the brain — the IdP — first, to make sure that a user is allowed to access that resource and to what degree.

A Brief History of IdPs

Traditionally, on-premise solutions like OpenLDAP and Microsoft Active Directory (AD) served as core IdPs, most often referred to as “user directories.” The communication between these IdPs and service providers took place over just one protocol: LDAP.

More technical infrastructure based on Linux would connect to OpenLDAP, while Microsoft Windows-based devices and applications would connect to AD. 

These paradigms worked reasonably well — until the rise of cloud infrastructure. Web apps, cloud-based servers, and other modern IT resources struggled to connect to OpenLDAP and AD. They leveraged different protocols, and networking became an issue. Over the past few years, MacOS systems have become increasingly popular, putting additional pressure on legacy directories.

Thankfully, a solution was made for the cloud era: Single Sign-On, or SSO.

IdPs and Single Sign-On (SSO)

If the IdP is the brain of identity management, Single Sign-On (SSO) is its secure courier, carrying messages from users to the brain and from the brain to various service providers. To transfer authentication and authorization information between the IdP and web-based applications, SSO providers use a standard protocol like SAML.

The flow looks something like this:

1. A user signs into an SSO platform with their username and password.
2. The SSO platform sends that information to the IdP.
3. The IdP confirms:
   1. The user’s set of login credentials.
   2. The user’s digital identity.
   3. The apps, servers, files, and networks that the user has access to.
   4. The user’s permissions within each of those resources.
4. The SSO passes this information to each application the user attempts to open, authenticating the user and authorizing the proper access.

Pretty slick, right?

But there’s an even simpler way to maintain identity integrity: a tool with a built-in user directory and built-in SSO. JumpCloud, for example, is a cloud-based identity provider and an SSO platform, using core protocols like LDAP, SAML, RADIUS, SSH, and REST to connect users to resources on-premises or in the cloud, regardless of the device they’re using.

An all-in-one identity solution like JumpCloud has myriad benefits — for IT teams, users, and the enterprises they work for.

Advantages of Modern Identity Management for Users and Enterprises

For users, a platform like JumpCloud:

• Grants immediate access to the right tools. No more bogging down help ticket queues with access requests. With a state-of-the-art identity provider, like JumpCloud, users are equipped with the information and apps they need from the first moment they log in.
• Eliminates password fatigue. With SSO, users only need to provide one global password. From there, they can use their fingerprint, face, or authenticator app to log in to the systems they need to.

For organizations, JumpCloud:

• Enhances security. With SSO, all authentication happens through one platform — not by communicating with each and every single provider. Reducing the number of authentication points inherently limits an organization’s points of vulnerability and minimizes the chances of a cyber attack. Adding multi-factor authentication (MFA) on top of joint IdP/SSO tacks on another layer of security, blocking scammers even if they hack a user’s SSO password.
• Centralizes user management. Any changes IT or MSP teams make to user identities happen silently in the background. Extended or restricted permissions update automatically the next time a person logs in with SSO. 

Learn More About JumpCloud

The JumpCloud Directory Platform, with its cloud directory and single sign-on capabilities make identity management agnostic in every respect: platform, location, and protocol — a critical requirement for modern companies that want to scale, try out hybrid or remote work structures, and modernize their tech stack.

Why bother playing catch up with the outdated identity management tools you currently have? Investing in comprehensive platforms gives you the basis to build your IT foundation for today and tomorrow. Check out this ebook about how Google Workspace and JumpCloud are teaming up to make your world a simpler, safer place to work.