Federated identity management is an arrangement that can be made between two or more trust domains, to allow users of these trust domains to access applications and services using the same digital identity. An identity such as this is known as federated identity and the use of such a solution pattern is known as identity federation.
In the networked economy, strategic partnerships and collaboration are an important way to develop and maintain competitive advantages. At the same time, enterprises also need to reduce costs, increase revenues and seize new business opportunities. This demands enterprises to enable convenient and secure business interactions with internal and external stakeholders, and create relationships to trust the electronic identities to access critical information resources. Federated identity management (FIM) is a system that enables individuals to use the same credentials or identification data to obtain access to the networks of multiple enterprises to conduct business transactions. FIM has demonstrated huge potential in providing reliable and scalable solutions to problems in systems security and access management. SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) is the dominant web services standard for FIM.
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