What Is Single Sign-On and Who Is It For?

Posted on Tuesday February 20, 2018

Statistics show that the average enterprise uses more than 90 cloud services. Even if small businesses use less than half that number, securely managing account logins is still a huge problem for users and administrators. Single Sign-On (SSO) is an excellent solution to this issue, so let's dive into how it works.

What is SSO?

Single Sign-On solutions allow you to create one username and one password that thousands of websites will recognize. If you've ever clicked ‘Login with Google' on a non-Google website, you've already enjoyed the benefits of SSO. It's faster, simpler, and more secure. Now, small businesses can accomplish the same level of efficiency between their employees and cloud platforms.

Instead of asking everyone in the office to track separate accounts for Office 365, Slack, Quickbooks, and whatever other cloud applications your company relies on, you can give them one set of credentials and manage what they have access to remotely. Employees come to work, enter their ACME Inc. username and password, and they're set for the day.

Why is SSO more secure?

There are a number of ways to set up a small-business SSO solution, but most of them focus on removing login information from your servers or network storage. Usually, you'll provide your employees' logins to an SSO provider (sometimes referred to as an Identity-as-a-Service provider) and each employee will receive a single login paired with a secondary authentication -- like a fingerprint or an SMS to a personal device.

Each time one of your employees visits a cloud platform, such as Office 365, the SSO provider will verify the user's identity and the security of the connection. If anything looks amiss, your IT provider will be notified.

Should your network or any of its devices be compromised, hackers would find nothing but logins to your SSO accounts, which are meaningless without fingerprints or mobile devices.

How to get started with SSO

The first step when setting up a Single Sign-On solution is making sure you have a healthy and responsive IT support system in place. You need a team that is constantly available to review suspicious alerts and troubleshoot employee issues. If you don't currently have that capacity, contact us today and we'll help you out!