As you company collects cloud services, it can be a pain tracking logins. A good way to get around that problem is providing your users with a single sign-on.
This is a delightful concept that gives your users a single password to get access to all of the sanctioned services your company uses. If they sign in using their password, they can access every service without having to log in to each one separately. It’s great time saver and a simple way to bring some order to your authentication process.
As we wrote last week in the post on the advantages two-factor authentication, people take one of several routes with passwords, none of which are ideal. Either they use the same one for every site, they use a really bad one, or they use a good one and then write it on a sticky note and attach it to their monitor. If they use any of these options, they are probably putting your company’s security at risk.
Enter single-sign on
Imagine opening your laptop, entering your user name and password and getting access to the world of cloud services in your organization in a one-stop portal. That’s exactly what Okta, OneLogin, and other similar services provide for their customers.
Too often the security burden is put on the shoulders of employees and the idea should be to hide the complexity from users and make it as easy as possible for them to do their jobs. The goal should not be to throw up roadblocks in the name of security. The harder you make it for your users, the more likely they are to find a work-around that could compromise your company’s security even further.
About six or seven years ago, we saw the rise of Shadow IT. This was when employees began to realize they didn’t need to ask IT for permission to sign up for a cloud service. They could just do it themselves without all of the administrative and bureaucratic overhead.
IT wasn’t happy about this development of course, but for every tech problem, there are startups launching to solve it and single sign-on solved a couple of problems. First of all, it reduced all that password clutter, and it gave an element of control. You could have this single sign-on convenience, but you had to use the sanctioned services to get it.
The portal approach also made it easier to not only sign in, but to access all of your services in one spot. If you’re not using single sign-on, it’s an easy way to bring order to your password chaos and to make your employees happy at the same time.
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