Single Sign On – What Is It and How Does It Affect Your Organization?

The increase in cyber threats in recent yeas has made the job of your IT team far more difficult. Keeping your network secure can take the focus away from keeping your technology updated and running properly. Single Sign On can take some of the strain off your IT team, allowing them to concentrate more on the tasks that are more important to growth of your organization.

Single Sign On – What is it?

Single Sign On (SSO) allows your users to log in to any related software system with a single username and password. Doing this makes the process of logging in much easier and reduces the likelihood of forgetting passwords. SSO can be real time saver.

How does it work?

Once a user accesses a website using SSO, they can then enter a different website that has the same relationship with the SSO solution. The authentication flow follows the same steps. Put simply, the system remembers that you got the password right on the original site and it will then allow access to the new site.

Does Single Sign On make my organization more or less secure?

SSO can be good and bad – the same features that make it an efficiency booster also make it a vulnerable feature in your IT landscape. It can potentially give a hacker one password to access multiple sites. Your employees may be accessing multiple sites and apps each day in the course of their jobs. Your IT team must have full identity governance to be sure that SSO is as secure as possible. Many companies tackle this issue by purchasing a centralized identity authenticator on special servers, allowing them to govern access to their system. When a team member signs in, their authentication passes through the SSO server, it then passes on their credential for authorizing that person to the app.

You can take this even further by implementing multi-factor or two-factor authentication – which will drastically improve the levels of security your organization is able to achieve. Anything that requires your team to prove their identity is a good thing – once having done so they can use their SSO login credentials successfully.

SSO – alongside other tools – can revolutionize your workplace going forward.

mPowered IT – Ensuring Your Cyber Security

mPoweredIT are your go-to proactive partner in keeping IT systems secure and defended. We never leave things to chance or wait for a problem to arise – predicting and preparing for the threats of tomorrow will help ensure your valuable data is protected and your business continuity maintained.