A cloud application development team needs to consider the following requirements to the built in as part of the application's authentication process: - Customers should have the flexibility to use…

Digital certificates act as portable, cryptographically verifiable identity credentials that can be validated by multiple relying parties and identity stores without requiring the user to re-enter a password, directly supporting the flexibility-of-identity-store requirement.

Single sign-on allows a user to authenticate once and gain access to multiple applications with different permission sets without being prompted for credentials again, directly satisfying the requirement that customers not be asked for credentials repeatedly.

One-time passwords are a per-session or per-transaction second-factor mechanism and do not reduce the number of authentication prompts a user encounters across different applications.

Federation describes the trust agreement between identity providers and service providers but is a framework, not an end-user authentication mechanism, and does not on its own prevent repeated credential prompts.

Multifactor authentication adds additional verification steps to the login process and increases friction rather than reducing the number of times users are prompted across applications.

Hardware tokens generate time-based or event-based codes for MFA and do not provide cross-application single sign-on or support flexible identity store integration.