Identity as a service provides management of employee, client, or user’s identification-related information as a digital entity. It reduces the problem of remembering every different username and password combination when an employee leaves the company or organization.

IDaaS may contain:

• Directory services
• Registration information
• Authentication services
• Risk and monitoring
• Event monitoring
• Profile management

Employees in an organization need to login to the system to perform various jobs. These systems may be a local server or cloud base. There are various problems that an employee may be facing like:

• Remembering a different username and password sequence for accessing various services.
• If any employee leaves the organization, it is needed to ensure that each account of that user is disabled. This increases the workload on the staff of IT.

To solve, this kind of problem, a new technique emerged, which is called as Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS).

Functions of Identity as a Service (IDaaS)

1. Cloud-based and multi-tenant architecture:- A multi-tenant architecture offers enormous benefits such as the vendor can issue updates, security fixtures, and improve performance. It also customizes the competence or capabilities to manage access provision and governance efficiency.
2. Security:–The important need of IDaaS is identity and access management. IDaaS in cloud computing offers characteristics such as multi-factor authentication, digital access cards, and biometrics. These characteristics help to quickly retrieve the information in a secure manner.
3.  Single sign-on federation:- It augments the experience of the end-user while maintaining security and availability of the network to use as intended. The client or user uses the secure password combination without working tough to remember that is used to access service on a regular basis.
4. Analytics and intelligence:– Analytics and intelligence capabilities are used to report the users of access privileges in the context of multifaceted associations. This association is between users, their roles and responsibilities, job function, and data usage.
5. Governance, risk, and compliance:-The governance, risk and compliance are supported by augmenting the automation and intelligence capabilities of an identity as a service system. This function supports an organization to define and automate the application- specific processes, which will get familiar with the access and usage pattern.

1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
2. Platform as a Service (PaaS)
3. Software as a Service (SaaS)
4. Identity as a service (IDaaS)
5. Network as a service (NaaS)

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

IaaS is also known as Hardware as a Service (HaaS). It is a computing infrastructure managed over the internet. The main advantage of using IaaS is that it helps users to avoid the cost and complexity of purchasing and managing the physical servers.

Characteristics of IaaS

There are the following characteristics of IaaS –

• Resources are available as a service
• Services are highly scalable
• Dynamic and flexible
• GUI and API-based access
• Automated administrative tasks

Example: DigitalOcean, Linode, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine (GCE), Rackspace, and Cisco Metacloud.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

PaaS cloud computing platform is created for the programmer to develop, test, run, and manage the applications.

Characteristics of PaaS

There are the following characteristics of PaaS –

• Accessible to various users via the same development application.
• Integrates with web services and databases.
• Builds on virtualization technology, so resources can easily be scaled up or down as per the organization’s need.
• Support multiple languages and frameworks.
• Provides an ability to “Auto-scale“.

Example: AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Windows Azure, Heroku, Force.com, Google App Engine, Apache Stratos, Magento Commerce Cloud, and OpenShift.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

SaaS is also known as “on-demand software“. It is a software in which the applications are hosted by a cloud service provider. Users can access these applications with the help of internet connection and web browser.

Characteristics of SaaS

There are the following characteristics of SaaS –

• Managed from a central location
• Hosted on a remote server
• Accessible over the internet
• Users are not responsible for hardware and software updates. Updates are applied automatically.
• The services are purchased on the pay-as-per-use basis

Example: BigCommerce, Google Apps, Salesforce, Dropbox, ZenDesk, Cisco WebEx, ZenDesk, Slack, and GoToMeeting.

Difference between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS

The below table shows the difference between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS –