What Is Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS)?

In this video, learn what Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) is, how ADFS works, its limitations, and ADFS alternatives. Read the full post: jumpcloud.com/...
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Transcript:
In this video, we'll cover what ADFS is, how it works, and why organizations use it before talking about its limitations and alternatives.
In today's interconnected world, many organizations need to share resources with partners or customers while maintaining secure access control and user management. One way to do this is Active Directory Federation Services, or ADFS. ADFS is Microsoft's on-prem single sign-on solution that provides user authentication for applications that don't work with active directory.
Let's see how it works. Imagine you work for a company that needs to collaborate with an outside partner on a project. Your partner has a web application that requires authentication, but your company uses a different set of credentials than the partners. So how can you access the application without creating new accounts and passwords? That's where ADFS comes in.
ADFS acts as a trust broker between your company's active directory and the partner's authentication system. When you try to access the partner's application, ADFS intercepts the request and prompts you to enter your company's credentials. Once authenticated, ADFS generates a security token that contains your identity information and sends it to the partner's application. The application can then verify the token's authenticity and authorize your access based on predefined policies.
ADFS supports various industry standards and protocols for identity federation, such as SAML, OAuth, and OpenID Connect. It can also handle scenarios like federated authentication where two or more organizations share resources and hybrid authentication where some users are located in the cloud and some are on premises. By using ADFS, windows-based organizations can reduce the complexity of managing multiple identity stores and enable seamless user authentication for both on-prem and off-prem devices.
But ADFS also has some limitations to consider. For instance, it requires additional infrastructure and maintenance efforts like setting up federation trust relationships, configuring certificates, and monitoring logs. ADFS may also introduce latency and single points of failure in the authentication flow, which can impact performance and availability. Committing to ADFS also locks companies into a Windows-based ecosystem. And in today's platform agnostic workplace, Windows is no longer the only player in the game. And ADFS doesn't work for all use cases such as mobile or non-browser applications. In these situations, other identity providers like JumpCloud may be a better fit.
JumpCloud offers a complete cloud IAM platform with true single sign-on capabilities that allow users to securely and efficiently connect to virtually any IT resource via SSO. Think Mac, Windows, and Linux devices, wifi networks, VPNs, cloud and legacy apps, physical and virtual file servers and more. Best of all, migrating from ADFS to JumpCloud is a straightforward process. Check out the link in the description to learn more about JumpCloud and be sure to subscribe to this channel for more educational videos.

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