What are identity providers?

An identity provider (abbreviated IdP) is a system entity that creates, maintains, and manages identity information for principals while providing authentication services to relying party applications within a federation or distributed network.

An identity provider offers user authentication as a service. Relying party applications, such as web applications, outsource the user authentication step to a trusted identity provider. Such a relying party application is said to be federated, that is, it consumes federated identity.

An identity provider is “a trusted provider that lets you use single sign-on (SSO) to access other websites.”SSO enhances usability by reducing password fatigue. It also provides better security by decreasing the potential attack surface.

Types of identity providers:

• SAML provider
• OpenID provider