Types of external identities
In this tutorial, we will learn about various types of external identities.
Today’s world is about collaboration, working with people both inside and outside of your organization. That means you’ll sometimes need to provide access to your organization’s applications or data to external users. However, Azure AD External Identities is a set of capabilities that enable organizations to allow access to external users.
Further, this ability for external users enables using Azure AD support of external identity providers. This can be other Azure AD tenants, Facebook, Google, or enterprise identity providers. Admins can set up federation with identity providers so your external users can sign in with their existing social or enterprise accounts instead of creating a new account just for your application.
Types of Azure AD external identities
There are two different Azure AD External Identities:
B2B collaboration
- Firstly, B2B collaboration allows you to share your organization’s applications and services with guest users from other organizations while maintaining control over your own data.
- Secondly, it uses an invitation and redemption process, allowing external users to access your resources with their credentials. Moreover, developers can customize the invitation and redemption process using Azure AD business-to-business APIs.
- Lastly, in this, external users are managed in the same directory as employees but are typically annotated as guest users. It supports SSO to all Azure AD-connected apps.
B2C access management
- Firstly, Azure AD B2C is a customer identity access management (CIAM) solution.
- Secondly, it allows external users to sign in with their preferred social, enterprise, or local account identities to get a single sign-on to your applications.
- Thirdly, it supports millions of users and billions of authentications per day. Moreover, it takes care of,
- the scaling and safety of the authentication platform monitoring
- automatically handling threats like denial-of-service, password spray, or brute force attacks.
- Next, with Azure AD B2C, external users are managed in the Azure AD B2C directory, separately from the organization’s employee and partner directory. Further, it supports SSO to customer apps within the Azure AD B2C tenant.
- Lastly, Azure AD B2C is an authentication solution that you can customize with your brand so that it blends with your web and mobile applications.
Reference: Microsoft Documentation