Importance Of Single Sign On For Maintaining Business

by Nancy Perez Technology / Software / Internet/

Single sign-on (SSO) provider has long been known in the IT world as an effective way for organizations to improve IT security while solving password management and user access issues. More specifically, Single Sign On a means for organizations to verify a person's identity before granting access to networks and application data. Some SSO solutions include monitoring capabilities that can provide records of individual employee access to applications, ensuring there are no network security breaches while enabling organizations to comply with regulatory and corporate governance initiatives. It is very time convenient as the user doesn’t need to remember different sets of password for opening other accounts.

During the regular SSO web service, the agent module that is in the application server retrieves the unique authentication details for that individual user stored in the SSO policy server. As this is done, the user is also authenticated against the repository user directory like the lightweight directory access protocol — single sign-on exchanges security certificates between SSO provider and application. The certificate is used to tell whether the user is authorized or not, if yes then it grants the access. This removes the user from the authentication process making logging in faster and secure.

Many sites like Google uses SSO technique for logging into different sets of applications that it provides. Applications like You tube, Gmail, Maps can be accessed by simply logging into Google account. SSO is designed in such a way that it enhances the user experience during login by making the process quick and simple. A user-friendly login process can be essential because the login screen is where the first interaction between the user and inner halls of the website will be taking place. With multiple logins sometimes the user forgets the code and ID which results in calling the helpdesk for solving the problem. Although the issue can be overcome it takes a lot of time, and the productivity is hampered. Hence having to remember the password and key for only one time significantly cuts down the login time so the employee can work efficiently and with accuracy.

Benefits of SSO in business:

1. Improved user experience: It makes sure that clients do not have any problem while signing in, as for different sites user don’t need to sign in separately.

2. Centralized user profile: It can be used for storing the data and information of their clients safely in the centralized server which cannot be hacked.

3. Centralized reporting and analyzing: across all digital properties, the reporting of the work done by the employee is centrally reported and analyzed.

SSO uses SAML format, which contains tokens. It eliminates all the passwords and instead uses standard cryptography and digital signature to pass the security. This method is used by maximum multinational companies as it a more secure and easy way of logging in. SSO is very convenient but also involves high risks, to reduce the risk factors Openid and SAML are used in order to increase the security of the site.