Now Federated Identities, as another form of authentication, provide the policies, processes, and mechanisms to manage identity and trusted access to systems across organizations and across the web. Now, one way to picture Federated Identity Management is to consider the phrase, "E pluribus unum." This phrase means, "Out of many, one." And in a sense, Federated Identity Management does much the same thing by allowing multiple sources to be able to validate a single identity and have trust built into the relationship in doing so.

This makes for a multi-system identity information for managing a global single sign-on type of an environment. It is based on trust relationships, commonly employing cross-certification between the various entities. And it is always standards-based, which ensures compliance and interoperability. In it, we have two primary entities, one being called the identity provider, which would hold all of the identities and in this case, generate a token for each valid known user whenever a validation transaction needs to be processed. The relying party would be the service provider and would be the consumer of these tokens. There has to be of course, a trust relationship between the identity provider and the relying party.

Now as mentioned, the relationship utilizes a token for the identity of the individuals seeking authorization. Now this process takes place in which a token is generated, and this is a form of a string of characters that will then be used to substitute sensitive information for the actual data of the entity being tokenized. And this of course, is then stored in a secured location, such as a database, which contains the relationship between the token and the subject, which it represents. We have of course, classic single sign-on. Now this is typically used for facilitating inter-organizational and inter-security domain access to resources by leveraging the Federated Identity Management system. Now classic single sign-on is basically, a one point of entry, which combines access to multiple resources behind it. Now this is often referred to as federation and indeed, this is the form that it takes in cloud and web environments.