What is Salesforce Identity and how is it used in Experience Cloud?

Salesforce Identity provides identity and access management features that Experience Cloud builds upon. Key capabilities:

1. Connected Apps — OAuth 2.0-based integrations that control which external apps can access community user data.
2. Identity Verification — multi-factor authentication (MFA) for community users, including time-based OTP and push notifications via the Salesforce Authenticator app.
3. Login Discovery — a custom login page that routes users to the appropriate authentication method based on their identifier.
4. Centralized Identity — Salesforce acts as an Identity Provider (IdP) for other systems, enabling SSO from the community to external applications using SAML or OpenID Connect.
5. Named Credentials — securely store authentication details for callouts from community Apex code to external APIs.