A company offers SaaS, maintaining all customers' credentials and authenticating locally.
Many large customers have requested the company offer some form of federation with their existing authentication infrastructures.
Which of the following would allow customers to manage authentication and authorizations from within their existing organizations?
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A. B. C. D.A.
The best solution for allowing customers to manage authentication and authorizations from within their existing organizations is to implement SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) so the company's services may accept assertions from the customers' authentication servers.
SAML is an XML-based standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between parties, in particular, between an identity provider (IDP) and a service provider (SP). SAML provides a way for a user to log in to a service provider's system using their credentials from an identity provider.
By implementing SAML, the company can accept assertions from customers' authentication servers, which means that the customers' authentication servers will be responsible for authenticating users and passing that authentication information to the company's SaaS. This allows customers to manage authentication and authorizations from within their existing organizations.
Option B, providing customers with a constrained interface to manage only their users' accounts in the company's active directory server, is not a good solution because it requires customers to manage their users' accounts in the company's active directory server, which may not be desirable from a security or management standpoint.
Option C, providing a system for customers to replicate their users' passwords from their authentication service to the company's, is also not a good solution because it requires storing customer passwords in the company's system, which can be a significant security risk.
Option D, using SOAP calls to support authentication between the company's product and the customers' authentication servers, is not a good solution because it requires a lot of development work and can be complicated to implement. SAML is a simpler and more widely accepted solution for this type of scenario.