SharePoint 2013 Authentication model

Question

I am new to SharePoint and have few questions regarding the authentication.

We are using SP 2013 as extranet and we have different sites for different partners. Total number of users will be less than 500. I think we can use either Forms based authentication or SAML token based authentication (ADFS 2.0). We are trying to avoid installing a domain for the authentication and prefer SQL server to store all the user details.

Is it good/secure to have only SQL based provider with Forms based authentication?

Answer 1

You may extend the SharePoint Web application with FBA, to create an extranet-facing access point to provide access to the partners. Extending an existing SharePoint Web application provides a separate IIS Web site and you can group external users into a different security domain than internal users.

This approach makes it easier to manage different groups of users and to maintain security. SharePoint supports this approach through zones. Each zone can support a different authentication method. Companies often use forms-based authentication (FBA) with Internet-facing zones because it is straightforward to set up and does not require additional hardware.

Image from Considerations for Extranet Development

Answer 2

Here is one more article explaining sharepoint 2013 security model

http://sureshpydi.blogspot.in/2013/03/sharepoint-2013-security-model.html