Login Central

We are all fully aware of what the internet brought us: Access to an unlimited raft of knowledge and the ability to do things. With that though comes a multitude of places to log in. Whether it be your bank, your favourite shopping site, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and the list goes on….and on.

Problem with all this is remembering your passwords. (Using post-it reminders on your screen or storing in the browser aren’t secure options)

Just having the extra job of yet again typing in your email address and password is so mind-numbingly boring and time-consuming.

Of course, some sites make this a bit more simple by saying that you can use either your Google account or your Facebook account or your Twitter account to log in at their site. That is really useful and takes the strain away from you somewhat.

Secure business logins

All of the above might be just what you do in own time and might not even take into account all of the different systems and applications you have to login into during work day. If you have a business in an environment where your users access many systems it is entirely possible that you have different logins for each system.

Somehow we need to remember all the passwords for each of these systems. Your post-its, apart from being insecure, won’t help you if you are logging in remotely. There is a solution though: Single Sign-On (SSO).

What is SSO?

Single Sign-on is where you are able to log in at one single point (typically with email and password) and the act of doing so provides you access to all applications and systems that are configured to work with SSO.

The Analogy

Picture yourself in a bank vault with 200 hundred deposit boxes. Each one has it its own lock. You want to access all 200 boxes. To do so you will need their own key which means fiddling around endlessly with a huge bunch of keys and finding the right one to open each and every one. That doesn’t bear thinking about.

What if though you had the ability to use one key in any of the locks and it then opens each and every one of the 200 boxes? Imagine how stress-free and helpful that would be. That’s kind of how SSO works.

Does it help measurably?

Yes, what SSO has been shown to do is:

• Reduce Password fatigue and the associated stress that goes with it
• Reduce time spent entering passwords
• Reduce IT costs because your help desk will be less busy handing ‘I can’t log in’ calls
• Reduce and mitigate risk to 3rd party applications and systems

Studies have shown that while employees objectively know they should create hard-to-guess passwords, the impracticality of remembering complex credentials often results in the reuse of weak passwords over and over again. In fact, nearly 90% of people ages 18–30 use the same password across multiple accounts.

When employees give in to the demand for increasingly complex passwords in order to thwart hackers, the frequency of password recoveries skyrockets. Because of these complex password requirements, 60% of people need to reset their passwords every 60 days — a practice that also costs companies an average £100 per employee per employee and is largely avoidable with SSO.

When companies embrace enterprise SSO, team members have to remember only one master set of credentials. This prevents them from creating unique, complex sets of passwords, reusing weak passwords, or keeping physical records of all passwords — all of which are inconvenient, costly, and insecure.

Utilising SSO for employees boosts productivity by reducing the time teams spend locked out of key tools while waiting for password resets and getting set up on new applications.

Employees are also much more likely to know about and take advantage of resources and tools that make their jobs easier and faster and answer common user questions when those applications are linked to one hub, as SSO allows.

So there you have it. SSO has massive benefits.