4 Benefits of Single Sign On for Your Business

Over the last decade, approximately 300 data breaches have taken place, including the theft of more than 100,000 records.

These numbers demonstrate a vital problem of sensitive data security issues that damage hundreds of companies and millions of users around the globe.

One of the solutions to secure your business, customer, and employee data is the Single Sign On (SSO) technology. For this reason, we decided to unveil this topic and pay your attention to the SSO solution covering:

• What is SSO login
• How SSO works
• 4 key benefits of single sign on
• 5 crucial SSO challenges to consider.

We hope this post will provide you with great insights and help secure your sensitive business data.

4 Benefits of Single Sign On

Before we discuss the benefits of single sign, how SSO works, its security advantages, let’s now find out what is SSO login in greater detail.

So, Single Sign-On, also known as SSO, stands for a user and session authentication technology that enables users to utilize a single set of credentials to access multiple services, platforms, and applications.

One of the most vivid examples is Google. Once you log in to Gmail, you automatically get authenticated to other Google apps like YouTube, AdSense, Google Analytics, Google Drive.

What Is SSO Login – Google Example

From a technical point of view, SSO is a federated identity management (FIM) arrangement, the so-called Identity Federation. IT is an authentication system that empowers users of different organizations to utilize the same verification method while accessing multiple apps.

Now let’s proceed to the core 4 benefits of single sign on that make it a great business initiative for your system.

1. Employee and IT productivity growth

Authentication processes play an integral role in the ecosystem of your organization. The larger your business becomes, the more authentication data needs to be processed and stored.

What’s more, a growing number of employees’ credentials may lead to lots of time spent instead of focusing on major tasks and key goals.

Right here are the 3 core benefits of single sign on in terms of employee and IT productivity:

• Improved user experience

As there is no need to switch between multiple website URLs, users can save from 5 to 15 seconds on the login process.

• Security risk mitigation

The Single Sign On technology allows your employees to use their single credentials in any browser, on any device, without any security risks.

• Support call reduction

Users utilizing their SSO login credentials with a single password do not require that much assistance from support as they do while trying to reset passwords for multiple platforms and services.

2. Risk-Based Authentication (RBA)

As we have mentioned above, each user utilizing the SSO credentials gets a unique token required by both the Service and Identity provider to facilitate the authentication process.

This scheme becomes even more secure by integrating it with risk-based authentication. This means that your team can monitor user habits and monitor all potential unusual behavior like new IPs, changed DNS providers, multi-login attempts, and many more.

This way, you can protect your corporate or customer data by offering extra identification verification. Once failed, the system denies access to a user and blocks his data like an IP, DNS, hardware, and other parameters to secure your system.

In short, risk-based authentication empowers your business to minimize or even avoid cyberattacks, sensitive data draining, and others.

3. Password fatigue decrease

Most modern organizations, platforms, and services recommend users generate unique passwords for each account. This may create lots of trouble as employees and users should write them down or even keep in mind to be secure enough.

As a result, you can encounter the so-called ‘password fatigue’. How does it work and hurt your company?

For example, you have a software product and hundreds or thousands of users that log in daily to access the functionality you provide. The more login trouble they face, the higher the chances of losing existing customers or potential clients are as they may just leave your website or app in favor of another competitor.

According to the Baymard Institute study, 18.75 percent of Amazon and Asos users leave their carts with chosen items because of forgotten passwords or failed password reset attempts.

This way, the core benefits of single sign on allow you to avoid password fatigue issues and provide an excellent user experience to customers.

4. Regulations and compliance compatibility

Regulatory compliance is a must-have attribute for any business that wants to successfully operate in the modern world. The SSO login helps your enterprise with compliance issues, too.

The single sign on technology helps you with such regulations as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA requiring well-documented IT controls, effective user authentication, audit controls to track activity and access, automatic logoff, and many others.

How SSO works? Being a part of the identity and access management (IAM) solution, it uses centralized storage that administrates user access to multiple resources more detailedly.

IAM systems provide the SSO technology with role-based access control (RBAC) that automatically provisions appropriate permissions and security policies to users.

What’s more, the single sign on solution has advanced functionality to remove granted access to users who no longer should use specific sensitive data.

For example, you can use single sign on to ensure that former partners, colleagues, and employees cannot access your corporate data.

4 Benefits of Single Sign-On | Ascendix Tech

How SSO Works

The SSO login includes 3 key identities:

• A user/browser
• Identity provider
• Service provider.

Let’s briefly discuss the key flow that will help you get a better understanding of how SSO works:

1. Users navigate to a website or app, the so-called Service Provider, they want to access.
2. Spotting a new user session, the Service Provider transfers a unique token that includes key users’ data like an email to an SSO system, the so-called Identity Provider.
3. Receiving a new unique token, the Identity Provider starts validating the current user on its authentication, checking whether they have already been authenticated. In case of success, the SSO system provides users with access and moves forward to the 5th step.
4. If the users’ authentication process fails, they will be asked to log in filling in the credentials required by the Identity Provider. Mostly, they include login and password values or some other methods like a One-Time Password (OTP).
5. Once users enter valid credentials, the Identity Provider returns the same token to the Service Providers with a status “success”.
6. The received token goes through the validation process by the Service Provider, checking for the trust relationship between those two providers.
7. Users get access to the Service Provider and start using the system.

Service Provider Initiated Workflow | Ascendix Tech

SSO Challenges You Should Consider

Apart from the vivid benefits of single sign on, it can also provide certain challenges that you should consider before using it for your business.

Below is a brief list of the core SSO challenges to keep in mind:

• Users should generate extra-strong passwords to minimize security breaches

If cybercriminals get access to users’ SSO accounts, they also breach sensitive data from all other SSO-linked sites.

• SSO downtime leads to full connected sites interruption

This means you should carefully choose the right SSO provider with plans that include breakdown support and maintenance.

• Identity provider shut down results in the SSO downtime as well

The vulnerability of the selected SSO provider is your vulnerability, which also means you should pay extra attention to the SSO vendor you opt for.

• Reduced sign on (RSO) is required to provide multi-level access

If you want to accommodate diverse layers of access for users, the reduced sign on (RSO) technology will come in handy. The case is that you may require extra authentication servers to succeed.

• Specific SSO-connected sites share user data with third-party entities

Carefully analyze the sites you link to an SSO account as they may provide your sensitive data to third-party entities without any law breaches.

Ascendix Single Sign On Solutions

At Ascendix, we have deep knowledge and solid experience in implementing an SSO login for clients’ systems thus making their platforms secure and optimized.

For example, we have helped one of the clients to re-design and re-implement their AWS infrastructure through building automated deployment pipelines and the Single Sign On login solution with AWS Cognito to let them use their own domain credentials to log in to the existing system.

Let’s now discuss the entire range of Ascendix AWS infrastructure​ optimization and improvement solutions for this client:

• Security Model was redesigned and reimplemented using the Single Sign On solution so that clients can use domain credentials to log in to the system and admins can share permissions in a flexible way. ​
• Introducing multitenancy that allows to deploy version to all required tenants in a timely manner and minimizes maintainability efforts.
• AWS infrastructure was improved with AWS Lambdas when AWS bills only for actual work and minimizes infrastructure costs. Autoscaling creates additional instances automatically once needed.
• The monitoring system was set up to collect metrics of the system, help engineers find root causes for the issues.
• Introduction and integration with the payment system (Stripe) were processed.
• Transfer from monolith architecture to micro-service architecture – easy to scale, reduces costs.

As a result, we have helped the client to reach a 245% ROI boost through the SSO login implementation, AWS infrastructure redesign and refactoring, multiple integrations, and introductions.

So, if you want to get your security model optimized and reduce total costs, feel free to hire Ascendix Tech for implementing a Single Sign On solution for your system. We will be glad to discuss your platform architecture and infrastructure thus suggesting advanced technology solutions with a ball-park estimate.

Wrapping Up

The Single Sign-On (SSO) login is a powerful technology that enables users to generate a single set of credentials for multiple services. This solution is a nice-to-have option for your business, and the benefits of single sign on will help you build a robust and secure infrastructure.

In case you are looking for a technology partner to help you set up the SSO login solution, Ascendix Tech will be glad to help you.

Check our case studies and contact us to discuss your project requirements and make your system as secure as possible.