Information Security Handbook

Authentication considerations

Authentication will take place as part of the federation between the cloud service and your backend enterprise directory service. You should consider adding multifactor authentication capabilities to your architecture when you move to federating your internal directory with external cloud services.

Once you federate with an external service, you have increased your overall threat surface as most cloud services will need to be accessible to the entire internet. This means that your username and passwords will be testable by malicious actors across each of your cloud platforms.

By adding a second factor to your authentication, you are ensuring that you need more information than just simply the username and password ...