Federation Services Key to Claims-Based Identity

Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS or Federation Services) is included in Windows Server 2012 R2 as a standard component, which reflects its growing importance to Microsoft’s claims-based identity infrastructure for user authentication and authorization to an organization’s key applications and services. With a claims-based identity infrastructure, applications and services use claims about users contained in security tokens from organizations they trust to determine the level of access to provide. As more Microsoft services rely on claims-based identity, deployment of Federation Services is no longer optional.

Federation Services Increasing Capabilities

Federation Services is a Windows Server role that provides claims-based access, including single sign-on (SSO), for on-premises and cloud-based applications for users within an organization, across organizations, or from the Internet. Identity federation among organizations and SSO are important because providing a user with a single ID and password to access multiple applications, such as a line-of-business application and Office 365, decreases the cost of maintaining identity information, and IDs and passwords should remain more secure. (For an explanation of claims-based identity, see the sidebar “Claims-Based Identity and Access Control“.)