Azure Active Directory (AD) B2C is a customer identity access management (CIAM) solution capable of providing services that scales to hundreds of millions of customer identities and is highly available globally. It is intended to enhance a regular Azure Active Directory instance to enable external user registration through a local account (email) or by delegating to a variety of social accounts (Facebook, Twitter etc.)
Who is Azure AD B2C for?
Anyone who wishes to utilize a white-label authentication solution to authenticate end users to their web or mobile applications. Besides authentication, the Azure AD B2C service is utilized for permission, such as allowing authenticated users to access API services. Both IT administrators and developers are advised to use Azure AD B2C.
Azure AD B2C features
- Seamless single sign-on: This is one of the most important Azure AD B2C features. It allows you to build a single sign-on (SSO) solution for all of your web, mobile, and API applications by using Azure AD B2C as the central authentication authority.
- Security: To safeguard and secure your customers’ identities, Azure AD B2C has built-in threat detection and multi-factor authentication (MFA).
- Scalability: With the help of this feature, the Azure AD B2C can accommodate demands of all levels and scales as per your requirement.
- Cost-effective: Given its self-support functionality and pay-as-you-go business model, the Azure AD B2C can help your organization lower its support expenses.
- Ease of integration: Regardless of the technological stack being used, it may be readily integrated into your websites, applications, and current technical infrastructure.
Azure AD B2C integrations
Your applications can be integrated with social, email or local accounts with the help of Azure AD B2C. It supports the following:
- Facebook account
- Twitter account
- Microsoft account
- Google account
- Apple ID
- LinkedIn account
- GitHub account
- along with any SAML or OIDC providers
Without further ado, let’s get started with the processes for authenticating users in Azure AD B2C.
Here’s How to Authenticate Users Via Microsoft Azure AD B2C
The first step is to create a Azure AD B2C tenant
- Start by navigating to the Azure AD portal. Sign in using an Azure account that has the contributor role or a subscription resource category allocated to it
- Select the directory where your subscription will be stored.
- In the Azure portal toolbar, select the Directory + Subscription icon, followed by the directory containing your subscription
- It is important to note that this directory is separate from the one where your Azure AD B2C tenant will be kept
- Click on create a resource from the Azure portal menu or the home tab
- Select create after searching for Azure AD B2C
- From the drop down menu, go with create a new Azure AD B2C tenant
- Now, enter the following on the create a directory page
- Organization name – Give your Azure AD B2C tenant a name
- Initial domain name – Enter an initial domain name for your Azure AD B2C tenant
- Nation or region – Choose your country or region from the drop-down menu. This option cannot be altered later
- Subscription – From the list, choose your subscription.
- Resource group – Choose or search for the resource group that will include the tenant
- Select Review+Create
- In order to resolve implementation concerns, look over your directory options and then select Create
Once you have completed the above steps, you are good to go.
The advantages of using Azure AD B2C are:
- Due to affordable price when compared to other suppliers or creating your own identity management system, Azure AD B2C implementation is particularly cost-effective.
- It handles multi-factor authentication and password self-service reset by applying some basic configurations.
- With Azure AD B2C, Microsoft takes over the work of integrating with social accounts such as Facebook and Google+, so developers can focus on the core functionality of the application.
- Azure AD B2C’s authentication system protects user credentials and identity. Two industry standard protocols are supported by Azure AD B2C: OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect.
Conclusion
Identity management is one of the most important functions of Azure Active Directory B2C. As it offers easy accessibility and security to consumers, it is a reliable service for authentication and identity management in consumer-facing applications. As it covers the monotonous part of application development, developers are able to concentrate on developing unique features rather than reinventing the wheel, then simply integrate their work with a time-proven and reliable B2C engine.