SSO – Greeting All Applications at Once

Here is a situation, you enter into a conference hall every day and you have to greet each member (it could be just five members on a day and fifty members on some other day). Would you not prefer greeting them all at once, rather than making non-productive individual small talks and wasting major chunk of your precious time.

IT enabled work environment interacts with multiple platforms, each platform support business processes, users, employees, departments and system administrators to accomplish their job functions. Often users (employees) have to sign on to multiple platforms because the Single Sign On feature is not adopted by the enterprise. Each platform may not have unified login details, the user name may differ and to ensuring best password algorithm, some platforms may require no caps password or one cap or one special symbol or a numeric… So does that sound pretty similar to you? 

Frustration and hassle that come along with ensuring super safe password while one logs in to a platform. In an enterprise setting such multiple login platforms eat up a lot of time, create duplication of effort by the user (by logging into each and every platform that may be required while conducting day to day tasks). How can we forget that visits and calls to the help desk it takes to retrieve a password…

So we just concluded our discussion of a problem, and every problem has one, if not many, solution. Single Sign-On (SSO) is a way of work-life. It enters the system once and limits repeated greetings (read Logins) for each member in the system. SSO is loosely understood as the key feature of Identity and Access Management Technology. It is a property of access control of multiple related, but independently managed software systems integrated with each other within an organizational setting. It allows logged in user to gains access to all authorised systems without being prompted to log in again at each of them.

So here it is, SSO allows users to greet all applications at once!

Multiple applications and resources, hosted on cloud or server in-premise, backed by varied authentication mechanisms – achieve synchronization. Single Sign-On house user credentials for varied platforms, and translate them into one algorithm for all touch-points. It verifies credential used for authentication in order to ensure that the right user enters the system. It also enhances the ability of system administrators to maintain the integrity of user account configuration. It strengthen IT governance processes to inhibit or to allow user to access information in a system.

An SSO enabled system streamlines access related work flow, minimises hassles by automating password management and one time login. It takes down the time spent in logging into multiple application and also reduces threat of attack by psychologically empowering users to remember just one password. Not to forget lowering the time spent by IT resources to tackle help desk complaints, it enables secure automation of access.