Azure Active Directory B2C

Azure Active Directory B2C provides business-to-customer identity as a service. Azure AD B2C is a customer identity access management (CIAM) solution capable of supporting your customers to use their preferred social, enterprise, or local account identities to get single sign-on access to your applications and APIs.

Azure AD B2C uses standards-based authentication protocols including OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0, and Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). It integrates with most modern applications and commercial off-the-shelf software. For example, Facebook, Microsoft account, Google, Twitter, and Active Directory Federation Service (AD FS).

With external identity providers, you can offer your consumers the ability to sign in with their existing social or enterprise accounts, without having to create a new account just for your application.

Azure AD B2C provides a directory that can hold 100 custom attributes per user. However, you can also integrate with external systems. For example, use Azure AD B2C for authentication, but delegate to an external customer relationship management (CRM) or customer loyalty database as the source of truth for customer data.

Another external user store scenario is to have Azure AD B2C handle the authentication for your application, but integrate with an external system that stores user profile or personal data. For example, to satisfy data residency requirements like regional or on-premises data storage policies. However, Azure AD B2C service itself is worldwide via the Azure public cloud.