Companies have increasingly turned to application service providers (ASPs) or
Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors to offer specialized web-based services
that will cut costs and provide specific and focused applications to users. The
complexity of designing, installing, configuring, deploying, and supporting the
system with internal resources can be eliminated with this type of methodology,
providing great benefit to organizations. However, these models can present an
authentication problem for corporations with a large number of external service
providers. This paper describes the implementation of Security Assertion Markup
Language (SAML) and its capabilities to provide secure single sign-on (SSO)
solutions for externally hosted applications.