Negosentro.com | Here’s How To Convince Your Company To Adopt Single Sign On | As companies grow, so does the complexity of the resources required to get work done. Even small businesses may employ dozens of applications, subdomains, and servers to manage information and improve workflows. Unfortunately, these productivity improvements come with a cost; malicious hackers seeking access to sensitive business data have more opportunities to steal passwords and login credentials as the number of access points balloons.
Effective password management is a critical tool for mitigating cybersecurity risks, but lack of managerial buy-in for new solutions can be a roadblock. Ahead, learn how to explain the value of managed sign on protocols to decision-makers at your company.
SSO Improves Security and User Experience
For most users managing several sets of credentials at a time, password management is a hassle. Often, this means that users don’t follow best practices when they set up new accounts; they may reuse the same easily guessed password several times or leave username and password options configured to default options when they’re available. The result is a vast attack surface for hackers trying to steal login credentials, which is the most common point of vulnerability for most businesses.
By contrast, single sign on providers offer a much simpler password strategy: Employees create one high-quality password and use it only once to sign into all the services they need. Fewer passwords overall means that your organization has fewer exploitable vulnerabilities, creating a more secure digital environment. Further, the ability to use a single set of login credentials makes employees’ lives easier by relieving them of the need to manage passwords on their own.
SSO Saves Money and Enhances Regulatory Compliance
You might not be surprised to hear that password reset requests make up 20-50% of all calls to IT help desks, but did you know that on average, those calls can cost an average of $70? Worse yet, the constant flow of urgent but low-level support requests for password assistance can prevent IT departments from working on more important long-term projects. Especially in businesses where IT is considered a cost center, the managerial team will appreciate the cost-effective nature of SSO solutions.
SSO can also be of use in meeting regulatory requirements. Regulations like HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley mandate the use of clearly articulated companywide security protocols to protect sensitive data, such as financial or medical information. Providing individual accounts to each user that permit activity logging makes it simple to create comprehensive audit trails that can be retained in the event that a regulatory body requests them.
SSO Integrates With Other Security Measures
Cybersecurity efforts shouldn’t end with SSO solutions. Most organizations benefit from a contextual approach to risk mitigation that integrates password management with broader identity and access management protocols, so when employees need to retrieve sensitive data, you can easily implement additional verification tools like multi-factor authentication or access management controls. For simplicity of use, many IT departments choose two-factor authentication, requiring only one additional form of identity. Although possession tools like key fobs and smart cards have been a cost-effective choice for 2FA solutions, lower costs and increased availability are leading more businesses to investigate biometric tools that rely on inheritance verification. Stand-alone fingerprint scanners are perhaps the most visible example of this trend, although there are numerous options for enterprise-scale deployment of biometric tools.
Role-based attribute control integrates especially well with SSO solutions if part of your company’s services includes allowing people outside the organization, like customers or vendors, to create accounts to allow them to access some of your company’s resources. Managing ill-defined external identities is often both challenging and risky, but with a combined RBAC and SSO approach, you can allocate one set of login credentials that grants access to the company’s sign-on portal and restrict access to approved resources only by assigning those credentials an external role. For companies that routinely handle sensitive information, integration with a finer-grained attribute-based access control method may be a better solution, but SSO is compatible with either choice.
Ensuring buy-in from key decision-makers about new IT processes is important, but the ease of use, internal popularity, and cost-saving potential offered by SSO tools make it easy to convince stakeholders to invest in better security.
