Whenever an application is required to be securely integrated with multiple service providers, authenticating these service providers is very critical. There is a need for standardizing the protocols and data exchange among the application, authentication provider and service providers.

Authentication is the process of verifying user credentials before allowing a user to access a protected resource. ASPs provide their own internal basic authentication type, which validates the user ID and password against their data store.

This whitepaper discusses a streamlined authentication mechanism using some of the authentication providers while integrating the application with multiple service providers.