Consumer-facing businesses now have an easy way to authenticate customers who are accessing their Web properties, while gaining the business advantages of connecting these customer portals and websites to social media outlets like Facebook and Google. Ping Identity’s new series of PingFederate Cloud Identity Connectors deliver capabilities that allow enterprises to rely on cloud services providers and social-networking sites for third-party user authentication.

“Identity federation at the enterprise is converging with the consumer and social media realm,” said Ping Identity CTO Patrick Harding. “Growing numbers of consumer-oriented businesses realize they can increase registration and purchase rates on their consumer-facing Web properties while providing a more personalized experience by empowering customers to easily access these business sites via their Facebook or Google logins.”

Cloud Identity Connectors install within PingFederate, allowing enterprises with consumer-facing applications to provide sign-on and registration using identities maintained at consumer identity providers such as Facebook, Yahoo!, Google and AOL.

”Allowing users to create accounts and sign on using an existing consumer identity has proven to drastically reduce drop-off rates,” said IDC Analyst Sally Hudson. “Enterprises benefit by reducing the expense and burden of managing consumer – and in some cases partner and contractor identities – and can request additional data about the user to provide a customized user experience.”

PingFederate Cloud Identity Connectors are now available for Salesforce and Facebook. A beta version of the OpenID Cloud Identity Connector also is available for OpenID providers including Google, Yahoo!, AOL and others. Additional connections will be released in 2011.

How PingFederate Cloud Identity Connectors Work

The Salesforce Cloud Identity Connector enables Salesforce CRM (including Customer and Partner Portals) to act as an Identity Provider. PingFederate leverages a Salesforce API to gather attributes about the user for inclusion in SAML assertions for SSO to any SAML enabled application, internal or external, providing an integrated user experience.

The Facebook Cloud Identity Connector enables Facebook to be used as a third-party authentication source. The Connector interfaces with the Facebook Graph API using OAuth 2.0 for authentication, as well as acquiring an OAuth access token used to gather additional data about the user.

The OpenID Cloud Identity Connector enables OpenID supported identity providers, including Google, Google Apps and Yahoo! to be used as a third-party authentication source. This Connector supports OpenID 2.0 and can be configured to support additional OpenID 2.0 providers.