Hey, it's Vince with JumpCloud®. Welcome to another episode of our "What Is?" video series.
In this episode, we'll be talking
about identity providers. So, what is an
identity provider? An identity provider,
or IDP for short, refers to a database
that stores user identities, which IT can
then federate to various IT resources.
They can also store many instantiations
of user identity, which contain
information such as usernames, passwords, SSH keys, biometric information, and other
attributes such as these. In doing so, IT
can securely manage and contact their
users to the IT resources that they need
from one centralized location.
Historically, one of the most popular
identity providers has been Microsoft®
Active Directory® (MAD). Introduced in 1999, Active Directory is an on-prem
directory services platform that was designed to
manage Windows usernames and passwords,
and connected this type of an identity
to on-prem, Windows-based IT resources.
This setup was common around the turn of the century.
Naturally, AD handled this use case quite
well. Yet, with the introduction of Mac® &
Linux® systems, non-Windows applications (both in the cloud and on-prem),
third-party storage solutions, and network spanning multiple locations; many IT admins have come to
discover that traditional IDPs like
Active Directory are struggling to keep up.
Fortunately, a new solution called JumpCloud Directory-as-a-Service® is
effectively a re-imagination of Active
Directory for the cloud era. That is,
rather than being an on-prem solution
designed specifically for Windows,
JumpCloud is a completely cloud-based
identity provider that supports all of
the different types of modern identities
that are connected to the same person.
JumpCloud can then federate these
identities to Windows, Mac, and Linux,
cloud and on-premise applications, third-party storage solutions, wired and wireless networks, and a lot more.
As a result, IT
can leverage a single cloud-based
identity provider to effectively manage
their entire IT network from one
centralized location, without anything on-prem. Contact JumpCloud for more
information about modern identity
providers, and to see how the JumpCloud
Directory-as-a-Service platform stacks up.
Of course, you can also sign up for a
free account to see one in action today,
or subscribe to our YouTube channel and
continue watching for more
JumpCloud videos.
 
