[oc_spacer height=”10″]Every second an internet user in Germany feels stressed by the increasing number of passwords required to access various services. This is the result of a survey published at the beginning of this year by internet portal Web.de. Many internet users therefore use the same and often also a relatively unsafe password for various services to reduce stress. Security experts view this as an extremely dangerous undertaking. Once hacked, all services are wide open to the criminals. The easiest and secure way out of this dilemma offers the so-called single sign-on (SSO).
SSO allows users to register on the network with a single password to access various services (e.g. Office 365). This means that users receive their access rights through transactions, which are running in the background without them noticing. SSO solutions operate local programmes as well as mobile apps, clouds and social networks.
SSO stands for Security in the Organisation
The security in the organisation increases with single sign-on as the passwords, which have been checked for safety, are centrally administered in the Active Directory. Individual users also no longer work with several unchecked passwords. Administrators are pleased as SSO reduces administrative effort. Even more convenient are SSO Managed Services, which are offered by IT service providers. They guarantee high availability and can help to achieve considerable cost savings as there are no additional hardware and software expenses.
Single Sign-On in the Cloud
If companies transfer parts of their services into the cloud and use applications available there, then this does not mean that with this step you no longer need to think about a secure authentication. On the contrary: Companies, which use several applications simultaneously in Azure or other clouds, achieve a high efficiency increase when their users do not have to log-in separately for each individual application. Here, it is also important to pay attention to a single sign-on procedure, which centrally combines various applications and authentication services. Above all, developers should always be able to work easily, but securely with all user privileges – independent if an application runs locally, is available as a web application or hosted in the cloud.
SSO Offer from Cloud Provider
Cloud provider oneclick offers for example a sophisticated remote app broker engine to enable central management of several applications. This allows processes to be mostly self-configured and they are ultimately automated. The single sign-on for all authorised applications provides only the basis. A central web file share and in particular the so-called Multi-Stream View increase user productivity. The reason: Users are always in their usual work environment and therefore have a clear overview of their familiar applications. With oneclick™, it is possible to display several windows/application streams simultaneously in one single website. This means that users can work parallel with several applications and even copy and paste between them. This is only an example to demonstrate that the single sign-on procedure can be the basis for many other valuable simplifications.
The current efforts of an alliance between German companies such as Daimler, Deutsche Bank and Springer shows how important a single sign-on system can be. They want to attack the dominance of Facebook and Google with a master key for the internet.
Sources:
Survey relating to password security by Web.de: https://newsroom.web.de/2017/01/11/tag-der-passwort-sicherheit-2017/
Daimler and Springer want a Master Key for the Internet: https://www.golem.de/news/single-sign-on-daimler-und-springer-wollen-generalschluessel-fuers-internet-1705-127684.html
