What is SAML and what are Identity Providers?

Products

• CloudHealth

Issue/Introduction

SAML, it stands for Security Assertion Markup Language and it is primarily used for SSO or Single Sign On configuration.

Security Assertion Markup Language is an XML-based, open-standard data format for exchanging authentication and authorization data between parties, in particular, between an identity provider (like Okta/Ping/Azure AD/ADFS/Google Apps) and a service provider (Auth0/the platform)

An Identity Provider (also known as an IDP), is software that is built around managing user access and sends SAML assertions to us when configured.

When a user logs in and the IDP sends us data along with the login, this data is called an Assertion. Within the assertion, there are attributes like “email” “name” and “roles” that allow the platform to create the user.