Federated Identity for Education

EMS-IC Federated SSO for Higher Ed

The Federated Identity solution for Education provides an opportunity for universities to quickly expand their reach by providing turn-key infrastructures necessary for enabling federated/external SSO to InCommon Federation's member service providers. Universities are continually challenged to provide students, faculty, and staff with access to protected external resources such as external libraries and other collaborative resources. Federated identity, also known as external single sign-on, eliminates the need for organizations and partners to manage accounts, passwords, and credentials for this external access through the use of single sign-on using existing, internal university credentials. Federated SSO consists of Identity Providers (IDPs) and Service Providers (SPs). An identity provider handles the authentication of the user to validate that they are indeed an inactive member of the IDP’s organization. A Service Provider represents an organization wishing to allow external users to access their resources.